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MISALLIANCE 

THE  DARK  LADY  OF  THE  SONNETS 

FANNY'S  FIRST  PLAY 


Works  of  Bernard  Shaw 


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BRENTANO'S 

FIFTH   AVENUE   AND    27th   STREET,    NEW  YORK 


MISALLIANCE,  THE  DARK 
LADY  OF  THE  SONNETS,  AND 
FANNY'S  FIRST  PLAY  •  WITH 
A  TREATISE  ON  PARENTS  AND 
CHILDREN  •  BY  BERNARD 
SHAW 


BRENTANO'S  •  NEW  YORK 
MCMXIV 


Copyright,  1914,  by  G.  Bernard  Shaw 


THE    UNIVERSITY    PRESS,  CAMBRIDGE,  U.S.A. 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Misalliance 

Parents  and  Children ix 

Trailing  Clouds  of  Glory ix 

The  Child  is  Father  to  the  Man     .    .  xi 

What  is  a  Child? xiv 

The  Sin  of  Nadab  and  Abihu     .    .    .  xvi 

The  Manufacture  of  Monsters   .    .    .  xviii 

Small  and  Large  Families xix 

Children  as  Nuisances xx 

Child  Fanciers       xxiv 

Childhood  as  a  State  of  Sin     ....  xxvi 

School xxvii 

My  Scholastic  Acquirements  ....  xxxi 

Schoolmasters  of  Genius xxxii 

What  We  Do  Not  Teach,  and  Why  .  xxxv 

Taboo  in  Schools xxxvii 

Alleged  Novelties  in  Modern  Schools  xxxix 

What  is  to  be  Done? xli 

Children's  Rights  and  Duties      .    .    .  xlii 

Should  Children  Earn  their  Living?  xliii 

Children's  Happiness xliv 

The  Horror  of  the  Perpetual  Holiday  xlv 

University  Schoolboyishness   ....  xlvii 

The  New  Laziness xlviii 

The  Infinite  School  Task xlix 

The  Rewards  and  Risks  of  Knowledge  li 
English    Physical    Hardihood   and 

Spiritual  Cowardice      liii 

The  Risks  of  Ignorance  and  Weakness  liv 

v 


3 


2034603 


vi  Contents 

PAGE 

The  Common  Sense  of  Toleration      .  lv 

The  Sin  of  Athanasius lvii 

The  Experiment  Experimenting     .    .  lx 

Why  We  Loathe  Learning  and  Love 

Sport Ixii 

Antichrist lxiv 

Under  the  Whip lxv 

Technical  Instruction lxix 

Docility  and  Dependence lxx 

The  Abuse  of  Docility lxxii 

The  Schoolboy  and  the  Homeboy      .     Ixxiv 
The  Comings  of  Age  of  Children    .    .     lxxvi 

The  Conflict  of  Wills Ixxvii 

The  Demagogue's  Opportunity      .    .     lxxix 

Our  Quarrelsomeness Ixxx 

We  Must  Reform  Society  before  we 

can  Reform  Ourselves      Ixxxi 

The  Pursuit  of  Manners      lxxxiii 

Not  too  much  Wind  on  the  Heath, 

Brother       lxxxiv 

Wanted:  a  Child's  Magna  Charta     .  lxxxvi 

The  Pursuit  of  Learning lxxxvi 

Children  and  Game:  a  Proposal    .     lxxxviii 
The  Parents'  Intolerable  Burden   .    .  lxxxix 

Mobilization       xci 

Children's      Rights      and      Parents' 

Wrongs xciii 

How    Little    We    Know    About    Our 

Parents xcv 

Our  Abandoned  Mothers xcvi 

Family  Affection       xcvii 

The  Fate  of  the  Family       ci 

Family  Mourning ciii 

Art  Teaching civ 

The  Impossibility  of  Secular  Educa- 
tion               cix 


Contents  vn 

PAGE  PAGE 

Natural  Selection  as  a  Religion      .    .  cxi 

Moral  Instruction  Leagues      ....  cxii 

The  Bible cxv 

Artist  Idolatry cxvii 

"The  Machine" cxix 

The  Provocation  to  Anarchism       .    .  cxx 

Imagination cxxii 

Government  by  Bullies cxxiv 

The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets     .  .    .    .109 

Preface 109 

How  the  Play  came  to  be  Written   .  109 

Thomas  Tyler 110 

Frank  Harris 113 

Harris  "durch  Mitleid  wissend"  .  .  115 
"Sidney's   Sister:   Pembroke's 

Mother" 117 

Shakespear's  Social  Standing      ...  118 

This  Side  Idolatry 120 

Shakespear's  Pessimism 122 

Gaiety  of  Genius 123 

Jupiter  and  Semele 126 

The  Idol  of  the  Bardolaters  ....  129 
Shakespear's  alleged  Sycophancy  and 

Perversion       132 

Shakespear  and  Democracy    .    .    .    ^  134 

Shakespear  and  the  British  Public    .  137 

Fanny's  First  Play 159 

Preface 159 


PARENTS  AND   CHILDREN 

Trailing  Clouds  of  Glory 

Childhood  is  a  stage  in  the  process  of  that  continual  re- 
manufacture  of  the  Life  Stuff  by  which  the  human  race  is 
perpetuated.  The  Life  Force  either  will  not  or  cannot 
achieve  immortality  except  in  very  low  organisms:  in- 
deed it  is  by  no  means  ascertained  that  even  the  amoeba 
is  immortal.  Human  beings  visibly  wear  out,  though 
they  last  longer  than  their  friends  the  dogs.  Turtles, 
parrots,  and  elephants  are  believed  to  be  capable  of  out- 
living the  memory  of  the  oldest  human  inhabitant.  But 
the  fact  that  new  ones  are  born  conclusively  proves  that 
they  are  not  immortal.  Do  away  with  death  and  you  do 
away  with  the  need  for  birth:  in  fact  if  you  went  on 
breeding,  you  would  finally  have  to  kill  old  people  to  make 
room  for  young  ones. 

Now  death  is  not  necessarily  a  failure  of  energy  on  the 
part  of  the  Life  Force.  People  with  no  imagination  try  to 
make  things  which  will  last  for  ever,  and  even  want  to 
live  for  ever  themselves.  But  the  intelligently  imagina- 
tive man  knows  very  well  that  it  is  waste  of  labor  to  make 
a  machine  that  will  last  ten  years,  because  it  will  probably 
be  superseded  in  half  that  time  by  an  improved  machine 
answering  the  same  purpose.  He  also  knows  that  if  some 
devil  were  to  convince  us  that  our  dream  of  personal  im- 
mortality is  no  dream  but  a  hard  fact,  such  a  shriek  of 
despair  would  go  up  from  the  human  race  as  no  other 
conceivable  horror  could  provoke.  With  all  our  perverse 
nonsense  as  to  John  Smith  living  for  a  thousand  million 
eons  and  for  ever  after,  we  die  voluntarily,  knowing  that 

ix 


x  Parents  and  Children 

it  is  time  for  us  to  be  scrapped,  to  be  remanufactured,  to 
come  back,  as  Wordsworth  divined,  trailing  ever  bright- 
ening clouds  of  glory.  We  must  all  be  born  again,  and 
yet  again  and  again.  We  should  like  to  live  a  little  longer 
just  as  we  should  like  £50:  that  is,  we  should  take  it  if 
we  could  get  it  for  nothing;  but  that  sort  of  idle  liking  is 
not  will.  It  is  amazing — considering  the  way  we  talk — 
how  little  a  man  will  do  to  get  £50:  all  the  £50  notes  I 
have  ever  known  of  have  been  more  easily  earned  than  a 
laborious  sixpence;  but  the  difficulty  of  inducing  a  man 
to  make  any  serious  effort  to  obtain  £50  is  nothing  to  the 
difficulty  of  inducing  him  to  make  a  serious  effort  to 
keep  alive.  The  moment  he  sees  death  approach,  he  gets 
into  bed  and  sends  for  a  doctor.  He  knows  very  well  at 
the  back  of  his  conscience  that  he  is  rather  a  poor  job 
and  had  better  be  remanufactured.  He  knows  that  his 
death  will  make  room  for  a  birth;  and  he  hopes  that  it 
will  be  a  birth  of  something  that  he  aspired  to  be  and  fell 
short  of.  He  knows  that  it  is  through  death  and  rebirth 
that  this  corruptible  shall  become  incorruptible,  and  this 
mortal  put  on  immortality.  Practise  as  you  will  on  his 
ignorance,  his  fears,  and  his  imagination,  with  bribes  of 
paradises  and  threats  of  hells,  there  is  only  one  belief 
that  can  rob  death  of  its  sting  and  the  grave  of  its  victory; 
and  that  is  the  belief  that  we  can  lay  down  the  burden 
of  our  wretched  little  makeshift  individualities  for  ever 
at  each  lift  towards  the  goal  of  evolution,  which  can  only 
be  a  being  that  cannot  be  improved  upon.  After  all, 
what  man  is  capable  of  the  insane  self-conceit  of  believing 
that  an  eternity  of  himself  would  be  tolerable  even  to  him- 
self? Those  who  try  to  believe  it  postulate  that  they  shall 
be  made  perfect  first.  But  if  you  make  me  perfect  I 
shall  no  longer  be  myself,  nor  will  it  be  possible  for  me  to 
conceive  my  present  imperfections  (and  what  I  cannot 
conceive  I  cannot  remember);  so  that  you  may  just  as 
well  give  me  a  new  name  and  face  the  fact  that  I  am  a 


Parents  and  Children  xi 

new  person  and  that  the  old  Bernard  Shaw  is  as  dead  as 
mutton.  Thus,  oddly  enough,  the  conventional  belief  in 
the  matter  comes  to  this:  that  if  you  wish  to  live  for  ever 
you  must  be  wicked  enough  to  be  irretrievably  damned, 
since  the  saved  are  no  longer  what  they  were,  and  in  hell 
alone  do  people  retain  their  sinful  nature:  that  is  to  say, 
their  individuality.  And  this  sort  of  hell,  however  con- 
venient as  a  means  of  intimidating  persons  who  have  prac- 
tically no  honor  and  no  conscience,  is  not  a  fact.  Death 
is  for  many  of  us  the  gate  of  hell;  but  we  are  inside  on 
the  way  out,  not  outside  on  the  way  in.  Therefore  let 
us  give  up  telling  one  another  idle  stories,  and  rejoice  in 
death  as  we  rejoice  in  birth;  for  without  death  we  cannot 
be  born  again;  and  the  man  who  does  not  wish  to  be  born 
again  and  born  better  is  fit  only  to  represent  the  City  of 
London  in  Parliament,  or  perhaps  the  university  of  Oxford. 

The  Child  is  Father  to  the  Man 

Is  he?  Then  in  the  name  of  common  sense  why  do  we 
always  treat  children  on  the  assumption  that  the  man  is 
father  to  the  child?  Oh,  these  fathers!  And  we  are  not 
content  with  fathers:  we  must  have  godfathers,  forgetting 
that  the  child  is  godfather  to  the  man.  Has  it  ever 
struck  you  as  curious  that  in  a  country  where  the  first 
article  of  belief  is  that  every  child  is  born  with  a  godfather 
whom  we  all  call  "our  father  which  art  in  heaven,"  two 
very  limited  individual  mortals  should  be  allowed  to  ap- 
pear at  its  baptism  and  explain  that  they  are  its  godpar- 
ents, and  that  they  will  look  after  its  salvation  until  it 
is  no  longer  a  child.  I  had  a  godmother  who  made  herself 
responsible  in  this  way  for  me.  She  presented  me  with  a 
Bible  with  a  gilt  clasp  and  edges,  larger  than  the  Bibles 
similarly  presented  to  my  sisters,  because  my  sex  entitled 
me  to  a  heavier  article.  I  must  have  seen  that  lady  at 
least  four  times  in  the  twenty  years  following.    She  never 


xii  Parents  and  Children 

alluded  to  my  salvation  in  any  way.  People  occasionally 
ask  me  to  act  as  godfather  to  their  children  with  a  levity 
which  convinces  me  that  they  have  not  the  faintest  notion 
that  it  involves  anything  more  than  calling  the  helpless 
child  George  Bernard  without  regard  to  the  possibility  that 
it  may  grow  up  in  the  liveliest  abhorrence  of  my  notions. 

A  person  with  a  turn  for  logic  might  argue  that  if  God 
is  the  Father  of  all  men,  and  if  the  child  is  father  to  the 
man,  it  follows  that  the  true  representative  of  God  at  the 
christening  is  the  child  itself.  But  such  posers  are  un- 
popular, because  they  imply  that  our  little  customs,  or, 
as  we  often  call  them,  our  religion,  mean  something,  or 
must  originally  have  meant  something,  and  that  we  under- 
stand and  believe  that  something. 

However,  my  business  is  not  to  make  confusion  worse 
confounded,  but  to  clear  it  up.  Only,  it  is  as  well  to  begin 
by  a  sample  of  current  thought  and  practice  which  shews 
that  on  the  subject  of  children  we  are  very  deeply  con- 
fused. On  the  whole,  whatever  our  theory  or  no  theory 
may  be,  our  practice  is  to  treat  the  child  as  the  property 
of  its  immediate  physical  parents,  and  to  allow  them  to 
do  what  they  like  with  it  as  far  as  it  will  let  them.  It 
has  no  rights  and  no  liberties:  in  short,  its  condition  is 
that  which  adults  recognize  as  the  most  miserable  and 
dangerous  politically  possible  for  themselves:  namely,  the 
condition  of  slavery.  For  its  alleviation  we  trust  to  the 
natural  affection  of  the  parties,  and  to  public  opinion. 
A  father  cannot  for  his  own  credit  let  his  son  go  in  rags. 
Also,  in  a  very  large  section  of  the  population,  parents 
finally  become  dependent  on  their  children.  Thus  there 
are  checks  on  child  slavery  which  do  not  exist,  or  are  less 
powerful,  in  the  case  of  manual  and  industrial  slavery. 
Sensationally  bad  cases  fall  into  two  classes,  which  are 
really  the  same  class:  namely,  the  children  whose  parents 
are  excessively  addicted  to  the  sensual  luxury  of  petting 
children,  and  the  children  whose  parents  are  excessively 


Parents  and  Children  xiii 

addicted  to  the  sensual  luxury  of  physically  torturing 
them.  There  is  a  Society  for  the  Prevention  of  Cruelty 
to  Children  which  has  effectually  made  an  end  of  our  be- 
lief that  mothers  are  any  more  to  be  trusted  than  step- 
mothers, or  fathers  than  slave-drivers.  And  there  is  a 
growing  body  of  law  designed  to  prevent  parents  from 
using  their  children  ruthlessly  to  make  money  for  the 
household.  Such  legislation  has  always  been  furiously 
resisted  by  the  parents,  even  when  the  horrors  of  factory 
slavery  were  at  their  worst;  and  the  extension  of  such 
legislation  at  present  would  be  impossible  if  it  were  not 
that  the  parents  affected  by  it  cannot  control  a  majority 
of  votes  in  Parliament.  In  domestic  life  a  great  deal  of 
service  is  done  by  children,  the  girls  acting  as  nursemaids 
and  general  servants,  and  the  lads  as  errand  boys.  In 
the  country  both  boys  and  girls  do  a  substantial  share  of 
farm  labor.  This  is  why  it  is  necessary  to  coerce  poor 
parents  to  send  their  children  to  school,  though  in  the 
relatively  small  class  which  keeps  plenty  of  servants  it  is 
impossible  to  induce  parents  to  keep  their  children  at 
home  instead  of  paying  schoolmasters  to  take  them  off 
their  hands. 

It  appears  then  that  the  bond  of  affection  between 
parents  and  children  does  not  save  children  from  the  slav- 
ery that  denial  of  rights  involves  in  adult  political  rela- 
tions. It  sometimes  intensifies  it,  sometimes  mitigates 
it;  but  on  the  whole  children  and  parents  confront  one 
another  as  two  classes  in  which  all  the  political  power  is 
on  one  side;  and  the  results  are  not  at  all  unlike  what 
they  would  be  if  there  were  no  immediate  consanguinity 
between  them,  and  one  were  white  and  the  other  black, 
or  one  enfranchised  and  the  other  disenfranchised,  or  one 
ranked  as  gentle  and  the  other  simple.  Not  that  Nature 
counts  for  nothing  in  the  case  and  political  rights  for  every- 
thing. But  a  denial  of  political  rights,  and  the  resultant 
delivery  of  one  class  into  the  mastery  of  another,  affects 


xiv  Parents  and  Children 

their  relations  so  extensively  and  profoundly  that  it  is 
impossible  to  ascertain  what  the  real  natural  relations  of 
the  two  classes  are  until  this  political  relation  is  abolished. 

What  is  a  Child? 

An  experiment.  A  fresh  attempt  to  produce  the  just 
man  made  perfect:  that  is,  to  make  humanity  divine. 
And  you  will  vitiate  the  experiment  if  you  make  the  slight- 
est attempt  to  abort  it  into  some  fancy  figure  of  your  own: 
for  example,  your  notion  of  a  good  man  or  a  womanly 
woman.  If  you  treat  it  as  a  little  wild  beast  to  be  tamed, 
or  as  a  pet  to  be  played  with,  or  even  as  a  means  to  save 
you  trouble  and  to  make  money  for  you  (and  these  are 
our  commonest  ways),  it  may  fight  its  way  through  in 
spite  of  you  and  save  its  soul  alive;  for  all  its  instincts  will 
resist  you,  and  possibly  be  strengthened  in  the  resistance; 
but  if  you  begin  with  its  own  holiest  aspirations,  and  suborn 
them  for  your  own  purposes,  then  there  is  hardly  any  limit 
to  the  mischief  you  may  do.  Swear  at  a  child,  throw  your 
boots  at  it,  send  it  flying  from  the  room  with  a  cuff  or  a 
kick;  and  the  experience  will  be  as  instructive  to  the  child 
as  a  difficulty  with  a  short-tempered  dog  or  a  bull.  Francis 
Place  tells  us  that  his  father  always  struck  his  children 
when  he  found  one  within  his  reach.  The  effect  on  the 
young  Places  seems  to  have  been  simply  to  make  them 
keep  out  of  their  father's  way,  which  was  no  doubt  what 
he  desired,  as  far  as  he  desired  anything  at  all.  Francis 
records  the  habit  without  bitterness,  having  reason  to 
thank  his  stars  that  his  father  respected  the  inside  of  his 
head  whilst  cuffing  the  outside  of  it;  and  this  made  it 
easy  for  Francis  to  do  yeoman's  service  to  his  country  as 
that  rare  and  admirable  thing,  a  Freethinker:  the  only 
sort  of  thinker,  I  may  remark,  whose  thoughts,  and  con- 
sequently whose  religious  convictions,  command  any 
respect. 


Parents  and  Children  xv 

Now  Mr  Place,  senior,  would  be  described  by  many  as 
a  bad  father;  and  I  do  not  contend  that  he  was  a  con- 
spicuously good  one.  But  as  compared  with  the  conven- 
tional good  father  who  deliberately  imposes  himself  on 
his  son  as  a  god;  who  takes  advantage  of  childish  credulity 
and  parent  worship  to  persuade  his  son  that  what  he  ap- 
proves of  is  right  and  what  he  disapproves  of  is  wrong; 
who  imposes  a  corresponding  conduct  on  the  child  by  a 
system  of  prohibitions  and  penalties,  rewards  and  eulogies, 
for  which  he  claims  divine  sanction :  compared  to  this  sort 
of  abortionist  and  monster  maker,  I  say,  Place  appears 
almost  as  a  Providence.  Not  that  it  is  possible  to  live 
with  children  any  more  than  with  grown-up  people  with- 
out imposing  rules  of  conduct  on  them.  There  is  a  point 
at  which  every  person  with  human  nerves  has  to  say  to  a 
child  "Stop  that  noise."  But  suppose  the  child  asks  why! 
There  are  various  answers  in  use.  The  simplest:  "Because 
it  irritates  me,"  may  fail;  for  it  may  strike  the  child  as 
being  rather  amusing  to  irritate  you;  also  the  child,  hav- 
ing comparatively  no  nerves,  may  be  unable  to  conceive 
your  meaning  vividly  enough.  In  any  case  it  may  want 
to  make  a  noise  more  than  to  spare  your  feelings.  You 
may  therefore  have  to  explain  that  the  effect  of  the  irri- 
tation will  be  that  you  will  do  something  unpleasant  if 
the  noise  continues.  The  something  unpleasant  may  be 
only  a  look  of  suffering  to  rouse  the  child's  affectionate 
sympathy  (if  it  has  any),  or  it  may  run  to  forcible  expul- 
sion from  the  room  with  plenty  of  unnecessary  violence; 
but  the  principle  is  the  same:  there  are  no  false  pretences 
involved:  the  child  learns  in  a  straightforward  way  that 
it  does  not  pay  to  be  inconsiderate.  Also,  perhaps,  that 
Mamma,  who  made  the  child  learn  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount,  is  not  really  a  Christian. 


xvi  Parents  and  Children 

The  Sin  of  Nadab  and  Abihu 

But  there  is  another  sort  of  answer  in  wide  use  which 
is  neither  straightforward,  instructive,  nor  harmless.  In 
its  simplest  form  it  substitutes  for  "Stop  that  noise," 
"Dont  be  naughty,"  which  means  that  the  child,  instead 
of  annoying  you  by  a  perfectly  healthy  and  natural  in- 
fantile procedure,  is  offending  God.  This  is  a  blasphemous 
lie;  and  the  fact  that  it  is  on  the  lips  of  every  nurserymaid 
does  not  excuse  it  in  the  least.  Dickens  tells  us  of  a  nurs- 
erymaid who  elaborated  it  into  "If  you  do  that,  angels 
wont  never  love  you."  I  remember  a  servant  who  used 
to  tell  me  that  if  I  were  not  good,  by  which  she  meant  if 
I  did  not  behave  with  a  single  eye  to  her  personal  conven- 
ience, the  cock  would  come  down  the  chimney.  Less 
imaginative  but  equally  dishonest  people  told  me  I  should 
go  to  hell  if  I  did  not  make  myself  agreeable  to  them. 
Bodily  violence,  provided  it  be  the  hasty  expression  of 
normal  provoked  resentment  and  not  vicious  cruelty, 
cannot  harm  a  child  as  this  sort  of  pious  fraud  harms  it. 
There  is  a  legal  limit  to  physical  cruelty;  and  there  are 
also  human  limits  to  it.  There  is  an  active  Society  which 
brings  to  book  a  good  many  parents  who  starve  and  tor- 
ture and  overwork  their  children,  and  intimidates  a  good 
many  more.  When  parents  of  this  type  are  caught,  they 
are  treated  as  criminals;  and  not  infrequently  the  police 
have  some  trouble  to  save  them  from  being  lynched. 
The  people  against  whom  children  are  wholly  unprotected 
are  those  who  devote  themselves  to  the  very  mischievous 
and  cruel  sort  of  abortion  which  is  called  bringing  up  a 
child  in  the  way  it  should  go.  Now  nobody  knows  the 
way  a  child  should  go.  All  the  ways  discovered  so  far 
lead  to  the  horrors  of  our  existing  civilizations,  described 
quite  justifiably  by  Ruskin  as  heaps  of  agonizing  human 
maggots,  struggling  with  one  another  for  scraps  of  food. 
Pious  fraud  is  an  attempt  to  pervert  that  precious  and 


Parents  and  Children  xvii 

sacred  thing  the  child's  conscience  into  an  instrument  of 
our  own  convenience,  and  to  use  that  wonderful  and  ter- 
rible power  called  Shame  to  grind  our  own  axe.  It  is  the 
sin  of  stealing  fire  from  the  altar:  a  sin  so  impudently 
practised  by  popes,  parents,  and  pedagogues,  that  one  can 
hardly  expect  the  nurserymaids  to  see  any  harm  in  steal- 
ing a  few  cinders  when  they  are  worrited. 

Into  the  blackest  depths  of  this  violation  of  children's 
souls  one  can  hardly  bear  to  look;  for  here  we  find  pious 
fraud  masking  the  violation  of  the  body  by  obscene  cruelty. 
Any  parent  or  school  teacher  who  takes  a  secret  and  abom- 
inable delight  in  torture  is  allowed  to  lay  traps  into  which 
every  child  must  fall,  and  then  beat  it  to  his  or  her  heart's 
content.  A  gentleman  once  wrote  to  me  and  said,  with 
an  obvious  conviction  that  he  was  being  most  reasonable 
and  high  minded,  that  the  only  thing  he  beat  his  children 
for  was  failure  in  perfect  obedience  and  perfect  truthful- 
ness. On  these  attributes,  he  said,  he  must  insist.  As 
one  of  them  is  not  a  virtue  at  all,  and  the  other  is  the  attri- 
bute of  a  god,  one  can  imagine  what  the  lives  of  this  gen- 
tleman's children  would  have  been  if  it  had  been  possible 
for  him  to  live  down  to  his  monstrous  and  foolish  preten- 
sions. And  yet  he  might  have  written  his  letter  to  The 
Times  (he  very  nearly  did,  by  the  way)  without  incurring 
any  danger  of  being  removed  to  an  asylum,  or  even  losing 
his  reputation  for  taking  a  very  proper  view  of  his  parental 
duties.  And  at  least  it  was  not  a  trivial  view,  nor  an  ill 
meant  one.  It  was  much  more  respectable  than  the  gen- 
eral consensus  of  opinion  that  if  a  school  teacher  can  de- 
vise a  question  a  child  cannot  answer,  or  overhear  it 
calling  omega  omeega,  he  or  she  may  beat  the  child  vi- 
ciously. Only,  the  cruelty  must  be  whitewashed  by  a 
moral  excuse,  and  a  pretence  of  reluctance.  It  must  be 
for  the  child's  good.  The  assailant  must  say  "This  hurts 
me  more  than  it  hurts  you."  There  must  be  hypocrisy 
as  well  as  cruelty.     The  injury  to  the  child  would  be  far 


xviii  Parents  and  Children 

less  if  the  voluptuary  said  frankly  "I  beat  you  because  I 
like  beating  you;  and  I  shall  do  it  whenever  I  can  contrive 
an  excuse  for  it."  But  to  represent  this  detestable  lust 
to  the  child  as  Divine  wrath,  and  the  cruelty  as  the  benef- 
icent act  of  God,  which  is  exactly  what  all  our  floggers 
do,  is  to  add  to  the  torture  of  the  body,  out  of  which  the 
flogger  at  least  gets  some  pleasure,  the  maiming  and 
blinding  of  the  child's  soul,  which  can  bring  nothing  but 
horror  to  anyone. 

The  Manufacture  of  Monsters 

This  industry  is  by  no  means  peculiar  to  China.  The 
Chinese  (they  say)  make  physical  monsters.  We  revile 
them  for  it  and  proceed  to  make  moral  monsters  of  our 
own  children.  The  most  excusable  parents  are  those  who 
try  to  correct  their  own  faults  in  their  offspring.  The 
parent  who  says  to  his  child:  "I  am  one  of  the  successes 
of  the  Almighty:  therefore  imitate  me  in  every  particular 
or  I  will  have  the  skin  off  your  back"  (a  quite  common 
attitude)  is  a  much  more  absurd  figure  than  the  man  who, 
with  a  pipe  in  his  mouth,  thrashes  his  boy  for  smoking. 
If  you  must  hold  yourself  up  to  your  children  as  an  object 
lesson  (which  is  not  at  all  necessary),  hold  yourself  up  as 
a  warning  and  not  as  an  example.  But  you  had  much 
better  let  the  child's  character  alone.  If  you  once  allow 
yourself  to  regard  a  child  as  so  much  material  for  you  to 
manufacture  into  any  shape  that  happens  to  suit  your 
fancy  you  are  defeating  the  experiment  of  the  Life  Force. 
You  are  assuming  that  the  child  does  not  know  its  own 
business,  and  that  you  do.  In  this  you  are  sure  to  be 
wrong:  the  child  feels  the  drive  of  the  Life  Force  (often 
called  the  Will  of  God);  and  you  cannot  feel  it  for  him. 
Handel's  parents  no  doubt  thought  they  knew  better  than 
their  child  when  they  tried  to  prevent  his  becoming  a  mu- 
sician.   They  would  have  been  equally  wrong  and  equally 


Parents  and  Children  xix 

unsuccessful  if  they  had  tried  to  prevent  the  child  becom- 
ing a  great  rascal  had  its  genius  lain  in  that  direction. 
Handel  would  have  been  Handel,  and  Napoleon  and  Peter 
of  Russia  ^emselves  in  spite  of  all  the  parents  in  creation, 
because,  as  often  happens,  they  were  stronger  than  their 
parents.  But  this  does  not  happen  always.  Most  chil- 
dren can  be,  and  many  are,  hopelessly  warped  and  wasted 
by  parents  who  are  ignorant  and  silly  enough  to  suppose 
that  they  know  what  a  human  being  ought  to  be,  and  who 
stick  at  nothing  in  their  determination  to  force  their  chil- 
dren into  their  moulds.  Every  child  has  a  right  to  its 
own  bent.  It  has  a  right  to  be  a  Plymouth  Brother 
though  its  parents  be  convinced  atheists.  It  has  a  right 
to  dislike  its  mother  or  father  or  sister  or  brother  or 
uncle  or  aunt  if  they  are  antipathetic  to  it.  It  has  a 
right  to  find  its  own  way  and  go  its  own  way,  whether 
that  way  seems  wise  or  foolish  to  others,  exactly  as  an 
adult  has.  It  has  a  right  to  privacy  as  to  its  own  doings 
and  its  own  affairs  as  much  as  if  it  were  its  own  father. 

Small  and  Large  Families 

These  rights  have  now  become  more  important  than 
they  used  to  be,  because  the  modern  practice  of  limiting 
families  enables  them  to  be  more  effectually  violated.  In 
a  family  of  ten,  eight,  six,  or  even  four  children,  the  rights 
of  the  younger  ones  to  a  great  extent  take  care  of  them- 
selves and  of  the  rights  of  the  elder  ones  too.  Two  adult 
parents,  in  spite  of  a  house  to  keep  and  an  income  to  earn, 
can  still  interfere  to  a  disastrous  extent  with  the  rights  and 
liberties  of  one  child.  But  by  the  time  a  fourth  child  has 
arrived,  they  are  not  only  outnumbered  two  to  one,  but 
are  getting  tired  of  the  thankless  and  mischievous  job  of 
bringing  up  their  children  in  the  way  they  think  they 
should  go.  The  old  observation  that  members  of  large 
families  get  on  in  the  world  holds  good  because  in  large 


xx  Parents  and  Children 

families  it  is  impossible  for  each  child  to  receive  what 
schoolmasters  call  "individual  attention."  The  children 
may  receive  a  good  deal  of  individual  attention  from  one 
another  in  the  shape  of  outspoken  reproach,  ruthless  rid- 
icule, and  violent  resistance  to  their  attempts  at  aggres- 
sion; but  the  parental  despots  are  compelled  by  the  mul- 
titude of  their  subjects  to  resort  to  political  rather  than 
personal  rule,  and  to  spread  their  attempts  at  moral 
monster-making  over  so  many  children,  that  each  child 
has  enough  freedom,  and  enough  sport  in  the  prophylactic 
process  of  laughing  at  its  elders  behind  their  backs,  to 
escape  with  much  less  damage  than  the  single  child.  In 
a  large  school  the  system  may  be  bad;  but  the  personal 
influence  of  the  head  master  has  to  be  exerted,  when  it  is 
exerted  at  all,  in  a  public  way,  because  he  has  little  more 
power  of  working  on  the  affections  of  the  individual  scholar 
in  the  intimate  way  that,  for  example,  the  mother  of  a 
single  child  can,  than  the  prime  minister  has  of  working 
on  the  affections  of  any  individual  voter. 

Children  as  Nuisances 

Experienced  parents,  when  children's  rights  are  preached 
to  them,  very  naturally  ask  whether  children  are  to  be  al- 
lowed to  do  what  they  like.  The  best  reply  is  to  ask 
whether  adults  are  to  be  allowed  to  do  what  they  like. 
The  two  cases  are  the  same.  The  adult  who  is  nasty  is 
not  allowed  to  do  what  he  likes:  neither  can  the  child 
who  likes  to  be  nasty.  There  is  no  difference  in  principle 
between  the  rights  of  a  child  and  those  of  an  adult:  the 
difference  in  their  cases  is  one  of  circumstance.  An  adult 
is  not  supposed  to  be  punished  except  by  process  of  law; 
nor,  when  he  is  so  punished,  is  the  person  whom  he  has 
injured  allowed  to  act  as  judge,  jury,  and  executioner. 
It  is  true  that  employers  do  act  in  this  way  every  day  to 
their  workpeople;  but  this  is  not  a  justified  and  intended 


Parents  and  Children  xxi 

part  of  the  situation:  it  is  an  abuse  of  Capitalism  which 
nobody  defends  in  principle.  As  between  child  and  parent 
or  nurse  it  is  not  argued  about  because  it  is  inevitable. 
You  cannot  hold  an  impartial  judicial  inquiry  every  time 
a  child  misbehaves  itself.  To  allow  the  child  to  misbe- 
have without  instantly  making  it  unpleasantly  conscious 
of  the  fact  would  be  to  spoil  it.  The  adult  has  therefore 
to  take  action  of  some  sort  with  nothing  but  his  conscience 
to  shield  the  child  from  injustice  or  unkindness.  The  ac- 
tion may  be  a  torrent  of  scolding  culminating  in  a  furious 
smack  causing  terror  and  pain,  or  it  may  be  a  remon- 
strance causing  remorse,  or  it  may  be  a  sarcasm  causing 
shame  and  humiliation,  or  it  may  be  a  sermon  causing  the 
child  to  believe  that  it  is  a  little  reprobate  on  the  road  to 
hell.  The  child  has  no  defence  in  any  case  except  the 
kindness  and  conscience  of  the  adult;  and  the  adult  had 
better  not  forget  this;  for  it  involves  a  heavy  responsibility. 

And  now  comes  our  difficulty.  The  responsibility,  be- 
ing so  heavy,  cannot  be  discharged  by  persons  of  feeble 
character  or  intelligence.  And  yet  people  of  high  character 
and  intelligence  cannot  be  plagued  with  the  care  of  chil- 
dren. A  child  is  a  restless,  noisy  little  animal,  with  an 
insatiable  appetite  for  knowledge,  and  consequently  a 
maddening  persistence  in  asking  questions.  If  the  child 
is  to  remain  in  the  room  with  a  highly  intelligent  and  sen- 
sitive adult,  it  must  be  told,  and  if  necessary  forced,  to 
sit  still  and  not  speak,  which  is  injurious  to  its  health,  un- 
natural, unjust,  and  therefore  cruel  and  selfish  beyond 
toleration.  Consequently  the  highly  intelligent  and  sen- 
sitive adult  hands  the  child  over  to  a  nurserymaid  who 
has  no  nerves  and  can  therefore  stand  more  noise,  but 
who  has  also  no  scruples,  and  may  therefore  be  very  bad 
company  for  the  child. 

Here  we  have  come  to  the  central  fact  of  the  question: 
a  fact  nobody  avows,  which  is  yet  the  true  explanation  of 
the  monstrous  system  of  child  imprisonment  and  torture 


xxii  Parents  and  Children 

which  we  disguise  under  such  hypocrisies  as  education, 
training,  formation  of  character  and  the  rest  of  it.  This 
fact  is  simply  that  a  child  is  a  nuisance  to  a  grown-up 
person.  What  is  more,  the  nuisance  becomes  more  and 
more  intolerable  as  the  grown-up  person  becomes  more 
cultivated,  more  sensitive,  and  more  deeply  engaged  in 
the  highest  methods  of  adult  work.  The  child  at  play  is 
noisy  and  ought  to  be  noisy:  Sir  Isaac  Newton  at  work  is 
quiet  and  ought  to  be  quiet.  And  the  child  should  spend 
most  of  its  time  at  play,  whilst  the  adult  should  spend 
most  of  his  time  at  work.  I  am  not  now  writing  on  behalf 
of  persons  who  coddle  themselves  into  a  ridiculous  con- 
dition of  nervous  feebleness,  and  at  last  imagine  themselves 
unable  to  work  under  conditions  of  bustle  which  to  healthy 
people  are  cheerful  and  stimulating.  I  am  sure  that  if 
people  had  to  choose  between  living  where  the  noise  of 
children  never  stopped  and  where  it  was  never  heard,  all 
the  goodnatured  and  sound  people  would  prefer  the  in- 
cessant noise  to  the  incessant  silence.  But  that  choice  is 
not  thrust  upon  us  by  the  nature  of  things.  There  is  no 
reason  why  children  and  adults  should  not  see  just  as 
much  of  one  another  as  is  good  for  them,  no  more  and  no 
less.  Even  at  present  you  are  not  compelled  to  choose 
between  sending  your  child  to  a  boarding  school  (which 
means  getting  rid  of  it  altogether  on  more  or  less  hypo- 
critical pretences)  and  keeping  it  continually  at  home. 
Most  working  folk  today  either  send  their  children  to 
day  schools  or  turn  them  out  of  doors.  This  solves  the 
problem  for  the  parents.  It  does  not  solve  it  for  the  chil- 
dren, any  more  than  the  tethering  of  a  goat  in  a  field  or 
the  chasing  of  an  unlicensed  dog  into  the  streets  solves  it 
for  the  goat  or  the  dog;  but  it  shews  that  in  no  class  are 
people  willing  to  endure  the  society  of  their  children,  and 
consequently  that  it  is  an  error  to  believe  that  the  family 
provides  children  with  edifying  adult  society,  or  that  the 
family  is  a  social  unit.    The  family  is  in  that,  as  in  so  many 


Parents  and  Children  xxiii 

other  respects,  a  humbug.  Old  people  and  young  people 
cannot  walk  at  the  same  pace  without  distress  and  final 
loss  of  health  to  one  of  the  parties.  When  they  are  sitting 
indoors  they  cannot  endure  the  same  degrees  of  tempera- 
ture and  the  same  supplies  of  fresh  air.  Even  if  the  main 
factors  of  noise,  restlessness,  and  inquisitiveness  are  left 
out  of  account,  children  can  stand  with  indifference  sights, 
sounds,  smells,  and  disorders  that  would  make  an  adult 
of  fifty  utterly  miserable;  whilst  on  the  other  hand  such 
adults  find  a  tranquil  happiness  in  conditions  which  to 
children  mean  unspeakable  boredom.  And  since  our 
system  is  nevertheless  to  pack  them  all  into  the  same  house 
and  pretend  that  they  are  happy,  and  that  this  particular 
sort  of  happiness  is  the  foundation  of  virtue,  it  is  found 
that  in  discussing  family  life  we  never  speak  of  actual 
adults  or  actual  children,  or  of  realities  of  any  sort,  but 
always  of  ideals  such  as  The  Home,  a  Mother's  Influence, 
a  Father's  Care,  Filial  Piety,  Duty,  Affection,  Family  Life, 
etc.  etc.,  which  are  no  doubt  very  comforting  phrases, 
but  which  beg  the  question  of  what  a  home  and  a  mother's 
influence  and  a  father's  care  and  so  forth  really  come  to 
in  practice.  How  many  hours  a  week  of  the  time  when 
his  children  are  out  of  bed  does  the  ordinary  bread-win- 
ning father  spend  in  the  company  of  his  children  or  even 
in  the  same  building  with  them?  The  home  may  be  a 
thieves'  kitchen,  the  mother  a  procuress,  the  father  a 
violent  drunkard;  or  the  mother  and  father  may  be  fash- 
ionable people  who  see  their  children  three  or  four  times 
a  year  during  the  holidays,  and  then  not  oftener  than  they 
can  help,  living  meanwhile  in  daily  and  intimate  contact 
with  their  valets  and  lady's-maids,  whose  influence  and 
care  are  often  dominant  in  the  household.  Affection,  as 
distinguished  from  simple  kindliness,  may  or  may  not 
exist:  when  it  does  it  either  depends  on  qualities  in  the 
parties'  that  would  produce  it  equally  if  they  were  of  no 
kin  to  one  another,  or  it  is  a  more  or  less  morbid  survival 


xxiv  Parents  and  Children 

of  the  nursing  passion;  for  affection  between  adults  (if 
they  are  really  adult  in  mind  and  not  merely  grown-up 
children)  and  creatures  so  relatively  selfish  and  cruel  as 
children  necessarily  are  without  knowing  it  or  meaning 
it,  cannot  be  called  natural:  in  fact  the  evidence  shews 
that  it  is  easier  to  love  the  company  of  a  dog  than  of  a 
commonplace  child  between  the  ages  of  six  and  the  be- 
ginnings of  controlled  maturity;  for  women  who  cannot 
bear  to  be  separated  from  their  pet  dogs  send  their  chil- 
dren to  boarding  schools  cheerfully.  They  may  say  and 
even  believe  that  in  allowing  their  children  to  leave  home 
they  are  sacrificing  themselves  for  their  children's  good; 
but  there  are  very  few  pet  dogs  who  would  not  be  the 
better  for  a  month  or  two  spent  elsewhere  than  in  a  lady's 
lap  or  roasting  on  a  drawingroom  hearthrug.  Besides, 
to  allege  that  children  are  better  continually  away  from 
home  is  to  give  up  the  whole  popular  sentimental  theory 
of  the  family;  yet  the  dogs  are  kept  and  the  children  are 
banished. 

Child  Fanciers 

There  is,  however,  a  good  deal  of  spurious  family  affec- 
tion. There  is  the  clannishness  that  will  make  a  dozen 
brothers  and  sisters  who  quarrel  furiously  among  them- 
selves close  up  their  ranks  and  make  common  cause  against 
a  brother-in-law  or  a  sister-in-law.  And  there  is  a  strong 
sense  of  property  in  children,  which  often  makes  mothers 
and  fathers  bitterly  jealous  of  allowing  anyone  else  to 
interfere  with  their  children,  whom  they  may  none  the 
less  treat  very  badly.  And  there  is  an  extremely  danger- 
ous craze  for  children  which  leads  certain  people  to  es- 
tablish orphanages  and  baby  farms  and  schools,  seizing 
any  pretext  for  filling  their  houses  with  children  exactly 
as  some  eccentric  old  ladies  and  gentlemen  fill  theirs  with 
cats.  In  such  places  the  children  are  the  victims  of  all 
the  caprices  of  doting  affection  and  all  the  excesses  of 


Parents  and  Children  xxv 

lascivious  cruelty.  Yet  the  people  who  have  this  morbid 
craze  seldom  have  any  difficulty  in  finding  victims.  Par- 
ents and  guardians  are  so  worried  by  children  and  so 
anxious  to  get  rid  of  them  that  anyone  who  is  willing  to 
take  them  off  their  hands  is  welcomed  and  whitewashed. 
The  very  people  who  read  with  indignation  of  Squeers  and 
Creakle  in  the  novels  of  Dickens  are  quite  ready  to  hand 
over  their  own  children  to  Squeers  and  Creakle,  and  to 
pretend  that  Squeers  and  Creakle  are  monsters  of  the 
past.  But  read  the  autobiography  of  Stanley  the  traveller, 
or  sit  in  the  company  of  men  talking  about  their  school- 
days, and  you  will  soon  find  that  fiction,  which  must,  if  it 
is  to  be  sold  and  read,  stop  short  of  being  positively  sick- 
ening, dare  not  tell  the  whole  truth  about  the  people  to 
whom  children  are  handed  over  on  educational  pretexts. 
Not  very  long  ago  a  schoolmaster  in  Ireland  was  murdered 
by  his  boys;  and  for  reasons  which  were  never  made  public 
it  was  at  first  decided  not  to  prosecute  the  murderers. 
Yet  all  these  flogging  schoolmasters  and  orphanage  fiends 
and  baby  farmers  are  "lovers  of  children."  They  are 
really  child  fanciers  (like  bird  fanciers  or  dog  fanciers)  by 
irresistible  natural  predilection,  never  happy  unless  they 
are  surrounded  by  their  victims,  and  always  certain  to 
make  their  living  by  accepting  the  custody  of  children, 
no  matter  how  many  alternative  occupations  may  be 
available.  And  bear  in  mind  that  they  are  only  the  ex- 
treme instances  of  what  is  commonly  called  natural  affec- 
tion, apparently  because  it  is  obviously  unnatural. 

The  really  natural  feeling  of  adults  for  children  in  the 
long  prosaic  intervals  between  the  moments  of  affection- 
ate impulse  is  just  that  feeling  that  leads  them  to  avoid 
their  care  and  constant  company  as  a  burden  beyond  bear- 
ing, and  to  pretend  that  the  places  they  send  them  to  are 
well  conducted,  beneficial,  and  indispensable  to  the  suc- 
cess of  the  children  in  after  life.  The  true  cry  of  the  kind 
mother  after  her  little  rosary  of  kisses   is   "Run  away, 


xxvi  Parents  and  Children 

darling."  It  is  nicer  than  "Hold  your  noise,  you  young 
devil;  or  it  will  be  the  worse  for  you";  but  fundamentally 
it  means  the  same  thing:  that  if  you  compel  an  adult  and 
a  child  to  live  in  one  another's  company  either  the  adult 
or  the  child  will  be  miserable.  There  is  nothing  whatever 
unnatural  or  wrong  or  shocking  in  this  fact;  and  there  is 
no  harm  in  it  if  only  it  be  sensibly  faced  and  provided  for. 
The  mischief  that  it  does  at  present  is  produced  by  our 
efforts  to  ignore  it,  or  to  smother  it  under  a  heap  of  sen- 
timental lies  and  false  pretences. 

Childhood  as  a  State  of  Sin 

Unfortunately  all  this  nonsense  tends  to  accumulate  as 
we  become  more  sympathetic.  In  many  families  it  is 
still  the  custom  to  treat  childhood  frankly  as  a  state  of 
sin,  and  impudently  proclaim  the  monstrous  principle 
that  little  children  should  be  seen  and  not  heard,  and  to 
enforce  a  set  of  prison  rules  designed  solely  to  make  co- 
habitation with  children  as  convenient  as  possible  for 
adults  without  the  smallest  regard  for  the  interests,  either 
remote  or  immediate,  of  the  children.  This  system  tends 
to  produce  a  tough,  rather  brutal,  stupid,  unscrupulous 
class,  with  a  fixed  idea  that  all  enjoyment  consists  in 
undetected  sinning;  and  in  certain  phases  of  civilization 
people  of  this  kind  are  apt  to  get  the  upper  hand  of  more 
amiable  and  conscientious  races  and  classes.  They  have 
the  ferocity  of  a  chained  dog,  and  are  proud  of  it.  But  the 
end  of  it  is  that  they  are  always  in  chains,  even  at  the 
height  of  their  military  or  political  success:  they  win 
everything  on  condition  that  they  are  afraid  to  enjoy  it. 
Their  civilizations  rest  on  intimidation,  which  is  so  nec- 
essary to  them  that  when  they  cannot  find  anybody 
brave  enough  to  intimidate  them  they  intimidate  them- 
selves and  live  in  a  continual  moral  and  political  panic. 
In  the  end  they  get  found  out  and  bullied.     But  that  is 


Parents  and  Children  xxvii 

not  the  point  that  concerns  us  here,  which  is,  that  they 
are  in  some  respects  better  brought  up  than  the  children 
of  sentimental  people  who  are  always  anxious  and  miser- 
able about  their  duty  to  their  children,  and  who  end  by 
neither  making  their  children  happy  nor  having  a  toler- 
able life  for  themselves.  A  selfish  tyrant  you  know  where  to 
have,  and  he  (or  she)  at  least  does  not  confuse  your  affec- 
tions; but  a  conscientious  and  kindly  meddler  may  liter- 
ally worry  you  out  of  your  senses.  It  is  fortunate  that 
only  very  few  parents  are  capable  of  doing  what  they 
conceive  their  duty  continuously  or  even  at  all,  and  that 
still  fewer  are  tough  enough  to  ride  roughshod  over  their 
children  at  home. 

School 

But  please  observe  the  limitation  "at  home."  What 
private  amateur  parental  enterprise  cannot  do  may  be 
done  very  effectively  by  organized  professional  enter- 
prise in  large  institutions  established  for  the  purpose. 
And  it  is  to  such  professional  enterprise  that  parents 
hand  over  their  children  when  they  can  afford  it.  They 
send  their  children  to  school;  and  there  is,  on  the  whole, 
nothing  on  earth  intended  for  innocent  people  so  hor- 
rible as  a  school.  To  begin  with,  it  is  a  prison.  But  it  is 
in  some  respects  more  cruel  than  a  prison.  In  a  prison, 
for  instance,  you  are  not  forced  to  read  books  written  by 
the  warders  and  the  governor  (who  of  course  would  not 
be  warders  and  governors  if  they  could  write  readable 
books),  and  beaten  or  otherwise  tormented  if  you  cannot 
remember  their  utterly  unmemorable  contents.  In  the 
prison  you  are  not  forced  to  sit  listening  to  turnkeys  dis- 
coursing without  charm  or  interest  on  subjects  that  they 
dont  understand  and  dont  care  about,  and  are  therefore 
incapable  of  making  you  understand  or  care  about.  In 
a  prison  they  may  torture  your  body;  but  they  do  not 
torture  your  brains;  and  they  protect  you  against  violence 


xxviii  Parents  and  Children 

and  outrage  from  your  fellow  prisoners.  In  a  school  you 
have  none  of  these  advantages.  With  the  world's  book- 
shelves loaded  with  fascinating  and  inspired  books,  the 
very  manna  sent  down  from  Heaven  to  feed  your  souls, 
you  are  forced  to  read  a  hideous  imposture  called  a  school 
book,  written  by  a  man  who  cannot  write:  a  book  from 
which  no  human  being  can  learn  anything:  a  book  which, 
though  you  may  decipher  it,  you  cannot  in  any  fruitful 
sense  read,  though  the  enforced  attempt  will  make  you 
loathe  the  sight  of  a  book  all  the  rest  of  your  life.  With 
millions  of  acres  of  woods  and  valleys  and  hills  and  wind 
and  air  and  birds  and  streams  and  fishes  and  all  sorts 
of  instructive  and  healthy  things  easily  accessible,  or 
with  streets  and  shop  windows  and  crowds  and  vehicles 
and  all  sorts  of  city  delights  at  the  door,  you  are  forced 
to  sit,  not  in  a  room  with  some  human  grace  and  comfort 
of  furniture  and  decoration,  but  in  a  stalled  pound  with 
a  lot  of  other  children,  beaten  if  you  talk,  beaten  if  you 
move,  beaten  if  you  cannot  prove  by  answering  idiotic 
questions  that  even  when  you  escaped  from  the  pound 
and  from  the  eye  of  your  gaoler,  you  were  still  agonizing 
over  his  detestable  sham  books  instead  of  daring  to  live. 
And  your  childish  hatred  of  your  gaoler  and  flogger  is 
nothing  to  his  adult  hatred  of  you;  for  he  is  a  slave  forced 
to  endure  your  society  for  his  daily  bread.  You  have 
not  even  the  satisfaction  of  knowing  how  you  are  tortur- 
ing him  and  how  he  loathes  you;  and  you  give  yourself 
unnecessary  pains  to  annoy  him  with  furtive  tricks  and 
spiteful  doing  of  forbidden  things.  No  wonder  he  is 
sometimes  provoked  to  fiendish  outbursts  of  wrath.  No 
wonder  men  of  downright  sense,  like  Dr  Johnson,  admit 
that  under  such  circumstances  children  will  not  learn 
anything  unless  they  are  so  cruelly  beaten  that  they 
make  desperate  efforts  to  memorize  words  and  phrases 
to  escape  flagellation.  It  is  a  ghastly  business,  quite 
beyond  words,  this  schooling. 


Parents  and  Children  xxix 

And  now  I  hear  cries  of  protest  arising  all  round.  First 
my  own  schoolmasters,  or  their  ghosts,  asking  whether  I 
was  cruelly  beaten  at  school?  No;  but  then  I  did  not 
learn  anything  at  school.  Dr  Johnson's  schoolmaster 
presumably  did  care  enough  whether  Sam  learned  any- 
thing to  beat  him  savagely  enough  to  force  him  to  lame 
his  mind — for  Johnson's  great  mind  was  lamed — by  learn- 
ing his  lessons.  None  of  my  schoolmasters  really  cared 
a  rap  (or  perhaps  it  would  be  fairer  to  them  to  say  that 
their  employers  did  not  care  a  rap  and  therefore  did  not 
give  them  the  necessary  caning  powers)  whether  I  learnt 
my  lessons  or  not,  provided  my  father  paid  my  schooling 
bill,  the  collection  of  which  was  the  real  object  of  the 
school.  Consequently  I  did  not  learn  my  school  lessons, 
having  much  more  important  ones  in  hand,  with  the  re- 
sult that  I  have  not  wasted  my  life  trifling  with  literary 
fools  in  taverns  as  Johnson  did  when  he  should  have  been 
shaking  England  with  the  thunder  of  his  spirit.  My 
schooling  did  me  a  great  deal  of  harm  and  no  good  what- 
ever: it  was  simply  dragging  a  child's  soul  through  the 
dirt;  but  I  escaped  Squeers  and  Creakle  just  as  I  escaped 
Johnson  and  Carlyle.  And  this  is  what  happens  to  most 
of  us.  We  are  not  effectively  coerced  to  learn:  we  stave 
off  punishment  as  far  as  we  can  by  lying  and  trickery  and 
guessing  and  using  our  wits;  and  when  this  does  not  suffice 
we  scribble  impositions,  or  suffer  extra  imprisonments — 
"keeping  in"  was  the  phrase  in  my  time — or  let  a  master 
strike  us  with  a  cane  and  fall  back  on  our  pride  at  being 
able  to  bear  it  physically  (he  not  being  allowed  to  hit  us 
too  hard)  to  outface  the  dishonor  we  should  have  been 
taught  to  die  rather  than  endure.  And  so  idleness  and 
worthlessness  on  the  one  hand  and  a  pretence  of  coercion 
on  the  other  became  a  despicable  routine.  If  my  school- 
masters had  been  really  engaged  in  educating  me  instead 
of  painfully  earning  their  bread  by  keeping  me  from  an- 
noying my  elders  they  would  have  turned  me  out  of  the 


xxx  Parents  and  Children 

school,  telling  me  that  I  was  thoroughly  disloyal  to  it; 
that  I  had  no  intention  of  learning;  that  I  was  mocking 
and  distracting  the  boys  who  did  wish  to  learn;  that  I 
was  a  liar  and  a  shirker  and  a  seditious  little  nuisance; 
and  that  nothing  could  injure  me  in  character  and  degrade 
their  occupation  more  than  allowing  me  (much  less  forc- 
ing me)  to  remain  in  the  school  under  such  conditions. 
But  in  order  to  get  expelled,  it  was  necessary  to  commit  a 
crime  of  such  atrocity  that  the  parents  of  other  boys 
would  have  threatened  to  remove  their  sons  sooner  than 
allow  them  to  be  schoolfellows  with  the  delinquent.  I 
can  remember  only  one  case  in  which  such  a  penalty  was 
threatened;  and  in  that  case  the  culprit,  a  boarder,  had 
kissed  a  housemaid,  or  possibly,  being  a  handsome 
youth,  been  kissed  by  her.  She  did  not  kiss  me;  and  no- 
body ever  dreamt  of  expelling  me.  The  truth  was,  a  boy 
meant  just  so  much  a  year  to  the  institution.  That  was 
why  he  was  kept  there  against  his  will.  That  was  why 
he  was  kept  there  when  his  expulsion  would  have  been  an 
unspeakable  relief  and  benefit  both  to  his  teachers  and 
himself. 

It  may  be  argued  that  if  the  uncommercial  attitude  had 
been  taken,  and  all  the  disloyal  wasters  and  idlers  shewn 
sternly  to  the  door,  the  school  would  not  have  been  emp- 
tied, but  filled.  But  so  honest  an  attitude  was  impossible. 
The  masters  must  have  hated  the  school  much  more  than 
the  boys  did.  Just  as  you  cannot  imprison  a  man  with- 
out imprisoning  a  warder  to  see  that  he  does  not  escape, 
the  warder  being  tied  to  the  prison  as  effectually  by  the 
fear  of  unemployment  and  starvation  as  the  prisoner  is 
by  the  bolts  and  bars,  so  these  poor  schoolmasters,  with 
their  small  salaries  and  large  classes,  were  as  much 
prisoners  as  we  were,  and  much  more  responsible  and 
anxious  ones.  They  could  not  impose  the  heroic  attitude 
on  their  employers;  nor  would  they  have  been  able  to 
obtain  places  as  schoolmasters  if  their  habits  had  been 


Parents  and  Children  xxxi 

heroic.  For  the  best  of  them  their  employment  was 
provisional:  they  looked  forward  to  escaping  from  it  into 
the  pulpit.  The  ablest  and  most  impatient  of  them  were 
often  so  irritated  by  the  awkward,  slow-witted,  slovenly 
boys:  that  is,  the  ones  that  required  special  consideration 
and  patient  treatment,  that  they  vented  their  irritation 
on  them  ruthlessly,  nothing  being  easier  than  to  entrap 
or  bewilder  such  a  boy  into  giving  a  pretext  for  punish- 
ing him. 

My  Scholastic  Acquirements 

The  results,  as  far  as  I  was  concerned,  were  what  might 
have  been  expected.  My  school  made  only  the  thinnest 
pretence  of  teaching  anything  but  Latin  and  Greek. 
When  I  went  there  as  a  very  small  boy  I  knew  a  good  deal 
of  Latin  grammar  which  I  had  been  taught  in  a  few  weeks 
privately  by  my  uncle.  When  I  had  been  several  years 
at  school  this  same  uncle  examined  me  and  discovered 
that  the  net  result  of  my  schooling  was  that  I  had  forgotten 
what  he  had  taught  me,  and  had  learnt  nothing  else.  To 
this  day,  though  I  can  still  decline  a  Latin  noun  and  re- 
peat some  of  the  old  paradigms  in  the  old  meaningless 
way,  because  their  rhythm  sticks  to  me,  I  have  never  yet 
seen  a  Latin  inscription  on  a  tomb  that  I  could  translate 
throughout.  Of  Greek  I  can  decipher  perhaps  the  greater 
part  of  the  Greek  alphabet.  In  short,  I  am,  as  to  classical 
education,  another  Shakespear.  I  can  read  French  as 
easily  as  English;  and  under  pressure  of  necessity  I  can 
turn  to  account  some  scraps  of  German  and  a  little  oper- 
atic Italian;  but  these  I  was  never  taught  at  school.  In- 
stead, I  was  taught  lying,  dishonorable  submission  to 
tyranny,  dirty  stories,  a  blasphemous  habit  of  treating 
love  and  maternity  as  obscene  jokes,  hopelessness,  eva- 
sion, derision,  cowardice,  and  all  the  blackguard's  shifts 
by  which  the  coward  intimidates  other  cowards.     And  if 


xxxii  Parents  and  Children 

I  had  been  a  boarder  at  an  English  public  school  instead 
of  a  day  boy  at  an  Irish  one,  I  might  have  had  to  add  to 
these,  deeper  shames  still. 

Schoolmasters  of  Genius 

And  now,  if  I  have  reduced  the  ghosts  of  my  school- 
masters  to   melancholy   acquiescence   in   all   this    (which 
everybody  who  has  been  at  an  ordinary  school  will  recog- 
nize as  true),  I  have  still  to  meet  the  much  more  sincere 
protests  of  the  handful  of  people  who  have  a  natural  genius 
for  "bringing  up"  children.     I  shall  be  asked  with  kindly 
scorn   whether  I  have  heard  of  Froebel  and  Pestalozzi, 
whether  I  know  the  work  that  is  being  done  by  Miss 
Mason  and  the  Dottoressa  Montessori  or,  best  of  all  as  I 
think,    the    Eurythmics    School    of   Jacques    Dalcroze   at 
Hellerau   near   Dresden.      Jacques   Dalcroze,    like   Plato, 
believes  in  saturating  his  pupils  with  music.     They  walk 
to  music,  play  to  music,  work  to  music,  obey  drill  com- 
mands that  would  bewilder  a  guardsman  to  music,  think 
to  music,  live  to  music,  get  so  clearheaded  about  music 
that  they  can  move  their  several  limbs  each  in  a  different 
metre  until   they   become  complicated  living   magazines 
of  cross  rhythms,  and,  what  is  more,  make  music  for  others 
to  do  all  these  things  to.     Stranger  still,  though  Jacques 
Dalcroze,  like  all  these  great  teachers,  is  the  completest 
of  tyrants,  knowing  what  is  right  and  that  he  must  and 
will  have  the  lesson  just  so  or  else  break  his  heart  (not 
somebody  else's,  observe),  yet  his  school  is  so  fascinating 
that  every  woman  who  sees  it  exclaims  "Oh,  why  was  I 
not  taught  like  this!"   and  elderly  gentlemen  excitedly 
enrol  themselves  as  students  and  distract  classes  of  infants 
by  their  desperate  endeavors  to  beat  two  in  a  bar  with  one 
hand  and  three  with  the  other,  and  start  off  on  earnest 
walks  round  the  room,  taking  two  steps  backward  when- 
ever  Monsieur   Dalcroze   calls   out   "Hop!"      Oh  yes:   I 


Parents  and  Children  xxxiii 

know  all  about  these  wonderful  schools  that  you  cannot 
keep  children  or  even  adults  out  of,  and  these  teachers 
whom  their  pupils  not  only  obey  without  coercion,  but 
adore.  And  if  you  will  tell  me  roughly  how  many  Masons 
and  Montessoris  and  Dalcrozes  you  think  you  can  pick 
up  in  Europe  for  salaries  of  from  thirty  shillings  to  five 
pounds  a  week,  I  will  estimate  your  chances  of  converting 
your  millions  of  little  scholastic  hells  into  little  scholastic 
heavens.  If  you  are  a  distressed  gentlewoman  starting 
to  make  a  living,  you  can  still  open  a  little  school;  and 
you  can  easily  buy  a  secondhand  brass  plate  inscribed 
Pestalozzian  Institute  and  nail  it  to  your  door,  though 
you  have  no  more  idea  of  who  Pestalozzi  was  and  what 
he  advocated  or  how  he  did  it  than  the  manager  of  a 
hotel  which  began  as  a  Hydropathic  has  of  the  water 
cure.  Or  you  can  buy  a  cheaper  plate  inscribed  Kinder- 
garten, and  imagine,  or  leave  others  to  imagine,  that 
Froebel  is  the  governing  genius  of  your  little  creche.  No 
doubt  the  new  brass  plates  are  being  inscribed  Montessori 
Institute,  and  will  be  used  when  the  Dotteressa  is  no  longer 
with  us  by  all  the  Mrs  Pipchins  and  Mrs  Wilfers  through- 
out this  unhappy  land. 

I  will  go  further,  and  admit  that  the  brass  plates  may 
not  all  be  frauds.  I  will  tell  you  that  one  of  my  friends 
was  led  to  genuine  love  and  considerable  knowledge  of 
classical  literature  by  an  Irish  schoolmaster  whom  you 
would  call  a  hedge  schoolmaster  (he  would  not  be  allowed 
to  teach  anything  now)  and  that  it  took  four  years  of 
Harrow  to  obliterate  that  knowledge  and  change  the  love 
into  loathing.  Another  friend  of  mine  who  keeps  a  school 
in  the  suburbs,  and  who  deeply  deplores  my  "prejudice 
against  schoolmasters,"  has  offered  to  accept  my  chal- 
lenge to  tell  his  pupils  that  they  are  as  free  to  get  up  and 
go  out  of  the  school  at  any  moment  as  their  parents  are 
to  get  up  and  go  out  of  a  theatre  where  my  plays  are 
being  performed.     Even  among  my  own  schoolmasters  I 


xxxiv  Parents  and  Children 

can  recollect  a  few  whose  classes  interested  me,  and  whom 
I  should  certainly  have  pestered  for  information  and  in- 
struction if  I  could  have  got  into  any  decent  human  re- 
lationship with  them,  and  if  they  had  not  been  compelled 
by  their  position  to  defend  themselves  as  carefully  against 
such  advances  as  against  furtive  attempts  to  hurt  them 
accidentally  in  the  football  field  or  smash  their  hats  with 
a  clod  from  behind  a  wall.  But  these  rare  cases  actually 
do  more  harm  than  good;  for  they  encourage  us  to  pre- 
tend that  all  schoolmasters  are  like  that.  Of  what  use 
is  it  to  us  that  there  are  always  somewhere  two  or  three 
teachers  of  children  whose  specific  genius  for  their  occu- 
pation triumphs  over  our  tyrannous  system  and  even  finds 
in  it  its  opportunity?  For  that  matter,  it  is  possible,  if 
difficult,  to  find  a  solicitor,  or  even  a  judge,  who  has  some 
notion  of  what  law  means,  a  doctor  with  a  glimmering  of 
science,  an  officer  who  understands  duty  and  discipline, 
and  a  clergyman  with  an  inkling  of  religion,  though  there 
are  nothing  like  enough  of  them  to  go  round.  But  even 
the  few  who,  like  Ibsen's  Mrs  Solness,  have  "a  genius  for 
nursing  the  souls  of  little  children"  are  like  angels  forced 
to  work  in  prisons  instead  of  in  heaven;  and  even  at  that 
they  are  mostly  underpaid  and  despised.  That  friend 
of  mine  who  went  from  the  hedge  schoolmaster  to  Har- 
row once  saw  a  schoolmaster  rush  from  an  elementary 
school  in  pursuit  of  a  boy  and  strike  him.  My  friend,  not 
considering  that  the  unfortunate  man  was  probably 
goaded  beyond  endurance,  smote  the  schoolmaster  and 
blackened  his  eye.  The  schoolmaster  appealed  to  the 
law;  and  my  friend  found  himself  waiting  nervously  in 
the  Hammersmith  Police  Court  to  answer  for  his  breach 
of  the  peace.  In  his  anxiety  he  asked  a  police  officer 
what  would  happen  to  him.  "What  did  you  do?"  said 
the  officer.  "I  gave  a  man  a  black  eye"  said  my  friend. 
"Six  pounds  if  he  was  a  gentleman:  two  pounds  if  he 
wasnt,"  said  the  constable.     "He  was  a  schoolmaster" 


Parents  and  Children  xxxv 

said  my  friend.  "Two  pounds"  said  the  officer;  and  two 
pounds  it  was.  The  blood  money  was  paid  cheerfully; 
and  I  have  ever  since  advised  elementary  schoolmasters 
to  qualify  themselves  in  the  art  of  self-defence,  as  the 
British  Constitution  expresses  our  national  estimate  of 
them  by  allowing  us  to  blacken  three  of  their  eyes  for 
the  same  price  as  one  of  an  ordinary  professional  man. 
How  many  Froebels  and  Pestalozzis  and  Miss  Masons 
and  Doctoress  Montessoris  would  you  be  likely  to  get  on 
these  terms  even  if  they  occurred  much  more  frequently 
in  nature  than  they  actually  do? 

No:  I  cannot  be  put  off  by  the  news  that  our  system 
would  be  perfect  if  it  were  worked  by  angels.  I  do  not 
admit  it  even  at  that,  just  as  I  do  not  admit  that 
if  the  sky  fell  we  should  all  catch  larks.  But  I  do 
not  propose  to  bother  about  a  supply  of  specific  genius 
which  does  not  exist,  and  which,  if  it  did  exist,  could 
operate  only  by  at  once  recognizing  and  establishing 
the  rights  of  children. 

What  We  Do  Not  Teach,  and  Why 

To  my  mind,  a  glance  at  the  subjects  now  taught  in 
schools  ought  to  convince  any  reasonable  person  that  the 
object  of  the  lessons  is  to  keep  children  out  of  mischief, 
and  not  to  qualify  them  for  their  part  in  life  as  responsible 
citizens  of  a  free  State.  It  is  not  possible  to  maintain 
freedom  in  any  State,  no  matter  how  perfect  its  original 
constitution,  unless  its  publicly  active  citizens  know  a  good 
deal  of  constitutional  history,  law,  and  political  science, 
with  its  basis  of  economics.  If  as  much  pains  had  been 
taken  a  century  ago  to  make  us  all  understand  Ricardo's 
law  of  rent  as  to  learn  our  catechisms,  the  face  of  the  world 
would  have  been  changed  for  the  better.  But  for  that 
very  reason  the  greatest  care  is  taken  to  keep  such  bene- 
ficially subversive  knowledge  from  us,  with  the  result  that 


xxxvi  Parents  and  Children 

in  public  life  we  are  either  place-hunters,  anarchists,  or 
sheep  shepherded  by  wolves. 

But  it  will  be  observed  that  these  are  highly  contro- 
versial subjects.  Now  no  controversial  subject  can  be 
taught  dogmatically.  He  who  knows  only  the  official 
side  of  a  controversy  knows  less  than  nothing  of  its  nature. 
The  abler  a  schoolmaster  is,  the  more  dangerous  he  is  to 
his  pupils  unless  they  have  the  fullest  opportunity  of 
hearing  another  equally  able  person  do  his  utmost  to 
shake  his  authority  and  convict  him  of  error. 

At  present  such  teaching  is  very  unpopular.  It  does 
not  exist  in  schools;  but  every  adult  who  derives  his 
knowledge  of  public  affairs  from  the  newspapers  can  take 
in,  at  the  cost  of  an  extra  halfpenny,  two  papers  of  oppo- 
site politics.  Yet  the  ordinary  man  so  dislikes  having  his 
mind  unsettled,  as  he  calls  it,  that  he  angrily  refuses  to 
allow  a  paper  which  dissents  from  his  views  to  be  brought 
into  his  house.  Even  at  his  club  he  resents  seeing  it,  and 
excludes  it  if  it  happens  to  run  counter  to  the  opinions 
of  all  the  members.  The  result  is  that  his  opinions  are 
not  worth  considering.  A  churchman  who  never  reads 
The  Freethinker  very  soon  has  no  more  real  religion  than 
the  atheist  who  never  reads  The  Church  Times.  The  at- 
titude is  the  same  in  both  cases:  they  want  to  hear 
nothing  good  of  their  enemies;  consequently  they  remain 
enemies  and  suffer  from  bad  blood  all  their  lives;  whereas 
men  who  know  their  opponents  and  understand  their 
case,  quite  commonly  respect  and  like  them,  and  always 
learn  something  from  them. 

Here,  again,  as  at  so  many  points,  we  come  up  against 
the  abuse  of  schools  to  keep  people  in  ignorance  and  error, 
so  that  they  may  be  incapable  of  successful  revolt  against 
their  industrial  slavery.  The  most  important  simple 
fundamental  economic  truth  to  impress  on  a  child  in 
complicated  civilizations  like  ours  is  the  truth  that  who- 
ever consumes  goods  or  services  without  producing  by 


Parents  and  Children  xxxvii 

personal  effort  the  equivalent  of  what  he  or  she  consumes, 
inflicts  on  the  community  precisely  the  same  injury  that 
a  thief  produces,  and  would,  in  any  honest  State,  be  treated 
as  a  thief,  however  full  his  or  her  pockets  might  be  of 
money  made  by  other  people.  The  nation  that  first  teaches 
its  children  that  truth,  instead  of  flogging  them  if  they 
discover  it  for  themselves,  may  have  to  fight  all  the  slaves 
of  all  the  other  nations  to  begin  with;  but  it  will  beat  them 
as  easily  as  an  unburdened  man  with  his  hands  free  and 
with  all  his  energies  in  full  play  can  beat  an  invalid  who 
has  to  carry  another  invalid  on  his  back. 

This,  however,  is  not  an  evil  produced  by  the  denial  of 
children's  rights,  nor  is  it  inherent  in  the  nature  of  schools. 
I  mention  it  only  because  it  would  be  folly  to  call  for  a 
reform  of  our  schools  without  taking  account  of  the  cor- 
rupt resistance  which  awaits  the  reformer. 

A  word  must  also  be  said  about  the  opposition  to  re- 
form of  the  vested  interest  of  the  classical  and  coercive 
schoolmaster.  He,  poor  wretch,  has  no  other  means  of 
livelihood;  and  reform  would  leave  him  as  a  workman  is 
now  left  when  he  is  superseded  by  a  machine.  He  had 
therefore  better  do  what  he  can  to  get  the  workman  com- 
pensated, so  as  to  make  the  public  familiar  with  the  idea 
of  compensation  before  his  own  turn  comes. 

Taboo  in  Schools 

The  suppression  of  economic  knowledge,  disastrous  as 
it  is,  is  quite  intelligible,  its  corrupt  motive  being  as  clear 
as  the  motive  of  a  burglar  for  concealing  his  jemmy 
from  a  policeman.  But  the  other  great  suppression  in 
our  schools,  the  suppression  of  the  subject  of  sex,  is  a 
case  of  taboo.  In  mankind,  the  lower  the  type,  and 
the  less  cultivated  the  mind,  the  less  courage  there  is 
to  face  important  subjects  objectively.  The  ablest  and 
most  highly  cultivated  people  continually  discuss  religion, 


xxxviii  Parents  and  Children 

politics,  and  sex:  it  is  hardly  an  exaggeration  to  say  that 
they  discuss  nothing  else  with  fully-awakened  interest. 
Commoner  and  less  cultivated  people,  even  when  they 
form  societies  for  discussion,  make  a  rule  that  politics  and 
religion  are  not  to  be  mentioned,  and  take  it  for  granted 
that  no  decent  person  would  attempt  to  discuss  sex.  The 
three  subjects  are  feared  because  they  rouse  the  crude 
passions  which  call  for  furious  gratification  in  murder  and 
rapine  at  worst,  and,  at  best,  lead  to  quarrels  and  unde- 
sirable states  of  consciousness. 

Even  when  this  excuse  of  bad  manners,  ill  temper,  and 
brutishness  (for  that  is  what  it  comes  to)  compels  us  to 
accept  it  from  those  adults  among  whom  political  and 
theological  discussion  does  as  a  matter  of  fact  lead  to  the 
drawing  of  knives  and  pistols,  and  sex  discussion  leads  to 
obscenity,  it  has  no  application  to  children  except  as  an 
imperative  reason  for  training  them  to  respect  other  peo- 
ple's opinions,  and  to  insist  on  respect  for  their  own  in 
these  as  in  other  important  matters  which  are  equally 
dangerous:  for  example,  money.  And  in  any  case  there 
are  decisive  reasons;  superior,  like  the  reasons  for  sus- 
pending conventional  reticences  between  doctor  and  pa- 
tient, to  all  considerations  of  mere  decorum,  for  giving 
proper  instruction  in  the  facts  of  sex.  Those  who  object 
to  it  (not  counting  coarse  people  who  thoughtlessly  seize 
every  opportunity  of  affecting  and  parading  a  fictitious 
delicacy)  are,  in  effect,  advocating  ignorance  as  a  safe- 
guard against  precocity.  If  ignorance  were  practicable 
there  would  be  something  to  be  said  for  it  up  to  the  age 
at  which  ignorance  is  a  danger  instead  of  a  safeguard. 
Even  as  it  is,  it  seems  undesirable  that  any  special  em- 
phasis should  be  given  to  the  subject,  whether  by  way  of 
delicacy  and  poetry  or  too  impressive  warning.  But  the 
plain  fact  is  that  in  refusing  to  allow  the  child  to  be  taught 
by  qualified  unrelated  elders  (the  parents  shrink  from  the 
lesson,  even  when  they  are  otherwise  qualified,  because 


Parents  and  Children  xxxix 

their  own  relation  to  the  child  makes  the  subject  impossible 
between  them)  we  are  virtually  arranging  to  have  our 
children  taught  by  other  children  in  guilty  secrets  and 
unclean  jests.  And  that  settles  the  question  for  all  sen- 
sible people. 

The  dogmatic  objection,  the  sheer  instinctive  taboo 
which  rides  the  subject  out  altogether  as  indecent,  has 
no  age  limit.  It  means  that  at  no  matter  what  age  a 
woman  consents  to  a  proposal  of  marriage,  she  should  do 
so  in  ignorance  of  the  relation  she  is  undertaking.  When 
this  actually  happens  (and  apparently  it  does  happen 
oftener  than  would  seem  possible)  a  horrible  fraud  is 
being  practiced  on  both  the  man  and  the  woman.  He  is 
led  to  believe  that  she  knows  what  she  is  promising,  and 
that  he  is  in  no  danger  of  finding  himself  bound  to  a  woman 
to  whom  he  is  eugenically  antipathetic.  She  contemplates 
nothing  but  such  affectionate  relations  as  may  exist  be- 
tween her  and  her  nearest  kinsmen,  and  has  no  knowledge 
of  the  condition  which,  if  not  foreseen,  must  come  as  an 
amazing  revelation  and  a  dangerous  shock,  ending  possibly 
in  the  discovery  that  the  marriage  has  been  an  irreparable 
mistake.  Nothing  can  justify  such  a  risk.  There  may 
be  people  incapable  of  understanding  that  the  right  to 
know  all  there  is  to  know  about  oneself  is  a  natural  human 
right  that  sweeps  away  all  the  pretences  of  others  to  tam- 
per with  one's  consciousness  in  order  to  produce  what 
they  choose  to  consider  a  good  character.  But  they  must 
here  bow  to  the  plain  mischievousness  of  entrapping  peo- 
ple into  contracts  on  which  the  happiness  of  their  whole 
lives  depends  without  letting  them  know  what  they  are 
undertaking. 

Alleged  Novelties  in  Modern  Schools 

There  is  just  one  more  nuisance  to  be  disposed  of  before 
I  come  to  the  positive  side  of  my  case.     I  mean  the  per- 


xl  Parents  and  Children 

son  who  tells  me  that  my  schooldays  belong  to  a  bygone 
order  of  educational  ideas  and  institutions,  and  that  schools 
are  not  now  a  bit  like  my  old  school.  I  reply,  with  Sir 
Walter  Raleigh,  by  calling  on  my  soul  to  give  this  state- 
ment the  lie.  Some  years  ago  I  lectured  in  Oxford  on 
the  subject  of  Education.  A  friend  to  whom  I  mentioned 
my  intention  said,  "You  know  nothing  of  modern  edu- 
cation: schools  are  not  now  what  they  were  when  you 
were  a  boy."  I  immediately  procured  the  time  sheets  of 
half  a  dozen  modern  schools,  and  found,  as  I  expected, 
that  they  might  all  have  been  my  old  school:  there  was 
no  real  difference.  I  may  mention,  too,  that  I  have  vis- 
ited modern  schools,  and  observed  that  there  is  a  tendency 
to  hang  printed  pictures  in  an  untidy  and  soulless  manner 
on  the  walls,  and  occasionally  to  display  on  the  mantel- 
shelf a  deplorable  glass  case  containing  certain  objects 
which  might  possibly,  if  placed  in  the  hands  of  the  pupils, 
give  them  some  practical  experience  of  the  weight  of  a 
pound  and  the  length  of  an  inch.  And  sometimes  a 
scoundrel  who  has  rifled  a  bird's  nest  or  killed  a  harmless 
snake  encourages  the  children  to  go  and  do  likewise  by 
putting  his  victims  into  an  imitation  nest  and  bottle  and 
exhibiting  them  as  aids  to  "Nature  study."  A  suggestion 
that  Nature  is  worth  study  would  certainly  have  staggered 
my  schoolmasters;  so  perhaps  I  may  admit  a  gleam  of 
progress  here.  But  as  any  child  who  attempted  to  handle 
these  dusty  objects  would  probably  be  caned,  I  do  not 
attach  any  importance  to  such  modernities  in  school 
furniture.  The  school  remains  what  it  was  in  my  boy- 
hood, because  its  real  object  remains  what  it  was.  And 
that  object,  I  repeat,  is  to  keep  the  children  out  of  mis- 
chief: mischief  meaning  for  the  most  part  worrying  the 
grown-ups. 


Parents  and  Children  xli 

What  is  to  be  Done? 

The  practical  question,  then,  is  what  to  do  with  the 
children.  Tolerate  them  at  home  we  will  not.  Let  them 
run  loose  in  the  streets  we  dare  not  until  our  streets  be- 
come safe  places  for  children,  which,  to  our  utter  shame, 
they  are  not  at  present,  though  they  can  hardly  be  worse 
than  some  homes  and  some  schools. 

The  grotesque  difficulty  of  making  even  a  beginning 
was  brought  home  to  me  in  the  little  village  in  Hertford- 
shire where  I  write  these  lines  by  the  lady  of  the  manor, 
who  asked  me  very  properly  what  I  was  going  to  do  for 
the  village  school.  I  did  not  know  what  to  reply.  As 
the  school  kept  the  children  quiet  during  my  working 
hours,  I  did  not  for  the  sake  of  my  own  personal  conven- 
ience want  to  blow  it  up  with  dynamite  as  I  should  like 
to  blow  up  most  schools.  So  I  asked  for  guidance.  'You 
ought  to  give  a  prize,"  said  the  lady.  I  asked  if  there  was 
a  prize  for  good  conduct.  As  I  expected,  there  was:  one 
for  the  best-behaved  boy  and  another  for  the  best-be- 
haved girl.  On  reflection  I  offered  a  handsome  prize  for 
the  worst-behaved  boy  and  girl  on  condition  that  a  record 
should  be  kept  of  their  subsequent  careers  and  compared 
with  the  records  of  the  best-behaved,  in  order  to  ascer- 
tain whether  the  school  criterion  of  good  conduct  was  valid 
out  of  school.  My  offer  was  refused  because  it  would  not 
have  had  the  effect  of  encouraging  the  children  to  give 
as  little  trouble  as  possible,  which  is  of  course  the  real 
object  of  all  conduct  prizes  in  schools. 

I  must  not  pretend,  then,  that  I  have  a  system  ready 
to  replace  all  the  other  systems.  Obstructing  the  way  of 
the  proper  organization  of  childhood,  as  of  everything  else, 
lies  our  ridiculous  misdistribution  of  the  national  income, 
with  its  accompanying  class  distinctions  and  imposition 
of  snobbery  on  children  as  a  necessary  part  of  their  social 
training.     The  result  of  our  economic  folly  is  that  we  are 


xlii  Parents  and  Children 

a  nation  of  undesirable  acquaintances;  and  the  first  object 
of  all  our  institutions  for  children  is  segregation.  If,  for 
example,  our  children  were  set  free  to  roam  and  play  about 
as  they  pleased,  they  would  have  to  be  policed;  and  the 
first  duty  of  the  police  in  a  State  like  ours  would  be  to  see 
that  every  child  wore  a  badge  indicating  its  class  in  so- 
ciety, and  that  every  child  seen  speaking  to  another  child 
with  a  lower-class  badge,  or  any  child  wearing  a  higher 
badge  than  that  allotted  to  it  by,  say,  the  College  of 
Heralds,  should  immediately  be  skinned  alive  with  a  birch 
rod.  It  might  even  be  insisted  that  girls  with  high-class 
badges  should  be  attended  by  footmen,  grooms,  or  even 
military  escorts.  In  short,  there  is  hardly  any  limit  to 
the  follies  with  which  our  Commercialism  would  infect 
any  system  that  it  would  tolerate  at  all.  But  something 
like  a  change  of  heart  is  still  possible;  and  since  all  the 
evils  of  snobbery  and  segregation  are  rampant  in  our 
schools  at  present  we  may  as  well  make  the  best  as  the 
worst  of  them. 

Children's  Rights  and  Duties 

Now  let  us  ask  what  are  a  child's  rights,  and  what  are 
the  rights  of  society  over  the  child.  Its  rights,  being  clearly 
those  of  any  other  human  being,  are  summed  up  in  the 
right  to  live:  that  is,  to  have  all  the  conclusive  arguments 
that  prove  that  it  would  be  better  dead,  that  it  is  a  child 
of  wrath,  that  the  population  is  already  excessive,  that 
the  pains  of  life  are  greater  than  its  pleasures,  that  its 
sacrifice  in  a  hospital  or  laboratory  experiment  might 
save  millions  of  lives,  etc.  etc.  etc.,  put  out  of  the  question, 
and  its  existence  accepted  as  necessary  and  sacred,  all 
theories  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding,  whether  by 
Calvin  or  Schopenhauer  or  Pasteur  or  the  nearest  person 
with  a  taste  for  infanticide.  And  this  right  to  live  in- 
cludes, and  in  fact  is,  the  right  to  be  what  the  child  likes 


Parents  and  Children  xliii 

and  can,  to  do  what  it  likes  and  can,  to  make  what  it  likes 
and  can,  to  think  what  it  likes  and  can,  to  smash  what  it 
dislikes  and  can,  and  generally  to  behave  in  an  altogether 
unaccountable  manner  within  the  limits  imposed  by  the 
similar  rights  of  its  neighbors.  And  the  rights  of  society 
over  it  clearly  extend  to  requiring  it  to  qualify  itself  to 
live  in  society  without  wasting  other  peoples  time:  that  is, 
it  must  know  the  rules  of  the  road,  be  able  to  read  pla- 
cards and  proclamations,  fill  voting  papers,  compose  and 
send  letters  and  telegrams,  purchase  food  and  clothing  and 
railway  tickets  for  itself,  count  money  and  give  and  take 
change,  and,  generally,  know  how  many  beans  made  five. 
It  must  know  some  law,  were  it  only  a  simple  set  of  com- 
mandments, some  political  economy,  agriculture  enough 
to  shut  the  gates  of  fields  with  cattle  in  them  and  not  to 
trample  on  growing  crops,  sanitation  enough  not  to  defile 
its  haunts,  and  religion  enough  to  have  some  idea  of  why 
it  is  allowed  its  rights  and  why  it  must  respect  the  rights 
of  others.  And  the  rest  of  its  education  must  consist  of 
anything  else  it  can  pick  up;  for  beyond  this  society  can- 
not go  with  any  certainty,  and  indeed  can  only  go  this 
far  rather  apologetically  and  provisionally,  as  doing  the 
best  it  can  on  very  uncertain  ground. 

Should  Children  Earn  their  Living? 

Now  comes  the  question  how  far  children  should  be 
asked  to  contribute  to  the  support  of  the  community.  In 
approaching  it  we  must  put  aside  the  considerations 
that  now  induce  all  humane  and  thoughtful  political  stu- 
dents to  agitate  for  the  uncompromising  abolition  of  child 
labor  under  our  capitalist  system.  It  is  not  the  least  of 
the  curses  of  that  system  that  it  will  bequeath  to  future 
generations  a  mass  of  legislation  to  prevent  capitalists 
from  "using  up  nine  generations  of  men  in  one  generation." 
as  they  began  by  doing  until  they  were  restrained  by  law 


xliv  Parents  and  Children 

at  the  suggestion  of  Robert  Owen,  the  founder  of  English 
Socialism.  Most  of  this  legislation  will  become  an  in- 
sufferable restraint  upon  freedom  and  variety  of  action 
when  Capitalism  goes  the  way  of  Druidic  human  sacri- 
fice (a  much  less  slaughterous  institution).  There  is 
every  reason  why  a  child  should  not  be  allowed  to  work 
for  commercial  profit  or  for  the  support  of  its  parents  at 
the  expense  of  its  own  future;  but  there  is  no  reason 
whatever  why  a  child  should  not  do  some  work  for  its  own 
sake  and  that  of  the  community  if  it  can  be  shewn  that 
both  it  and  the  community  will  be  the  better  for  it. 

Children's  Happiness 

Also  it  is  important  to  put  the  happiness  of  the  children 
rather  carefully  in  its  place,  which  is  really  not  a  front 
place.  The  unsympathetic,  selfish,  hard  people  who  re- 
gard happiness  as  a  very  exceptional  indulgence  to  which 
children  are  by  no  means  entitled,  though  they  may  be 
allowed  a  very  little  of  it  on  their  birthdays  or  at  Christ- 
mas, are  sometimes  better  parents  in  effect  than  those  who 
imagine  that  children  are  as  capable  of  happiness  as 
adults.  Adults  habitually  exaggerate  their  own  capacity 
in  that  direction  grossly;  yet  most  adults  can  stand  an 
allowance  of  happiness  that  would  be  quite  thrown  away 
on  children.  The  secret  of  being  miserable  is  to  have 
leisure  to  bother  about  whether  you  are  happy  or  not. 
The  cure  for  it  is  occupation,  because  occupation  means 
pre-occupation;  and  the  pre-occupied  person  is  neither 
happy  nor  unhappy,  but  simply  alive  and  active,  which 
is  pleasanter  than  any  happiness  until  you  are  tired  of  it. 
That  is  why  it  is  necessary  to  happiness  that  one  should 
be  tired.  Music  after  dinner  is  pleasant:  music  before 
breakfast  is  so  unpleasant  as  to  be  clearly  unnatural.  To 
people  who  are  not  overworked  holidays  are  a  nuisance. 
To  people  who  are,  and  who  can  afford  them,  they  are  a 


Parents  and  Children  xlv 

troublesome  necessity.     A  perpetual   holiday  is   a  good 
working  definition  of  hell. 

The  Horror  of  the  Perpetual  Holiday 

It  will  be  said  here  that,  on  the  contrary,  heaven  is 
always  conceived  as  a  perpetual  holiday,  and  that  who- 
ever is  not  born  to  an  independent  income  is  striving  for 
one  or  longing  for  one  because  it  gives  holidays  for  life. 
To  which  I  reply,  first,  that  heaven,  as  conventionally 
conceived,  is  a  place  so  inane,  so  dull,  so  useless,  so  miser- 
able, that  nobody  has  ever  ventured  to  describe  a  whole 
day  in  heaven,  though  plenty  of  people  have  described  a 
day  at  the  seaside;  and  that  the  genuine  popular  verdict 
on  it  is  expressed  in  the  proverb  "Heaven  for  holiness 
and  Hell  for  company."  Second,  I  point  out  that  the 
wretched  people  who  have  independent  incomes  and  no 
useful  occupation,  do  the  most  amazingly  disagreeable 
and  dangerous  things  to  make  themselves  tired  and  hun- 
gry in  the  evening.  When  they  are  not  involved  in  what 
they  call  sport,  they  are  doing  aimlessly  what  other  peo- 
ple have  to  be  paid  to  do:  driving  horses  and  motor  cars; 
trying  on  dresses  and  walking  up  and  down  to  shew  them 
off;  and  acting  as  footmen  and  housemaids  to  royal  per- 
sonages. The  sole  and  obvious  cause  of  the  notion  that 
idleness  is  delightful  and  that  heaven  is  a  place  where 
there  is  nothing  to  be  done,  is  our  school  system  and  our 
industrial  system.  The  school  is  a  prison  in  which  work 
is  a  punishment  and  a  curse.  In  avowed  prisons,  hard 
labor,  the  only  alleviation  of  a  prisoner's  lot,  is  treated  as 
an  aggravation  of  his  punishment;  and  everything  possible 
is  done  to  intensify  the  prisoner's  inculcated  and  unnatural 
notion  that  work  is  an  evil.  In  industry  we  are  over- 
worked and  underfed  prisoners.  Under  such  absurd  cir- 
cumstances our  judgment  of  things  becomes  as  perverted 
as  our  habits.     If  we  were  habitually  underworked  and 


xlvi  Parents  and  Children 

overfed,  our  notion  of  heaven  would  be  a  place  where 
everybody  worked  strenuously  for  twenty-four  hours  a 
day  and  never  got  anything  to  eat. 

Once  realize  that  a  perpetual  holiday  is  beyond  human 
endurance,  and  that  "Satan  finds  some  mischief  still  for 
idle  hands  to  do"  and  it  will  be  seen  that  we  have  no  right 
to  impose  a  perpetual  holiday  on  children.  If  we  did, 
they  would  soon  outdo  the  Labor  Party  in  their  claim  for 
a  Right  to  Work  Bill. 

In  any  case  no  child  should  be  brought  up  to  suppose 
that  its  food  and  clothes  come  down  from  heaven  or  are 
miraculously  conjured  from  empty  space  by  papa.  Loath- 
some as  we  have  made  the  idea  of  duty  (like  the  idea  of 
work)  we  must  habituate  children  to  a  sense  of  repayable 
obligation  to  the  community  for  what  they  consume  and 
enjoy,  and  inculcate  the  repayment  as  a  point  of  honor. 
If  we  did  that  today — and  nothing  but  flat  dishonesty 
prevents  us  from  doing  it — we  should  have  no  idle  rich 
and  indeed  probably  no  rich,  since  there  is  no  distinction 
in  being  rich  if  you  have  to  pay  scot  and  lot  in  personal 
effort  like  the  working  folk.  Therefore,  if  for  only  half 
an  hour  a  day,  a  child  should  do  something  serviceable 
to  the  community. 

Productive  work  for  children  has  the  advantage  that 
its  discipline  is  the  discipline  of  impersonal  necessity,  not 
that  of  wanton  personal  coercion.  The  eagerness  of  chil- 
dren in  our  industrial  districts  to  escape  from  school  to 
the  factory  is  not  caused  by  lighter  tasks  or  shorter  hours 
in  the  factory,  nor  altogether  by  the  temptation  of  wages, 
nor  even  by  the  desire  for  novelty,  but  by  the  dignity  of 
adult  work,  the  exchange  of  the  factitious  personal  tyranny 
of  the  schoolmaster,  from  which  the  grown-ups  are  free, 
for  the  stern  but  entirely  dignified  Laws  of  Life  to  which 
all  flesh  is  subject. 


Parents  and  Children  xlvii 

University  Schoolboyishness 

Older  children  might  do  a  good  deal  before  beginning 
their  collegiate  education.  What  is  the  matter  with  our 
universities  is  that  all  the  students  are  schoolboys,  whereas 
it  is  of  the  very  essence  of  university  education  that  they 
should  be  men.  The  function  of  a  university  is  not  to 
teach  things  that  can  now  be  taught  as  well  or  better  by 
University  Extension  lectures  or  by  private  tutors  or  mod- 
ern correspondence  classes  with  gramophones.  We  go  to 
them  to  be  socialized;  to  acquire  the  hall  mark  of  com- 
munal training;  to  become  citizens  of  the  world  instead  of 
inmates  of  the  enlarged  rabbit  hutches  we  call  homes;  to 
learn  manners  and  become  unchallengeable  ladies  and 
gentlemen.  The  social  pressure  which  effects  these  changes 
should  be  that  of  persons  who  have  faced  the  full  respon- 
sibilities of  adults  as  working  members  of  the  general 
community,  not  that  of  a  barbarous  rabble  of  half  eman- 
cipated schoolboys  and  unemancipable  pedants.  It  is 
true  that  in  a  reasonable  state  of  society  this  outside  ex- 
perience would  do  for  us  very  completely  what  the  uni- 
versity does  now  so  corruptly  that  we  tolerate  its  bad 
manners  only  because  they  are  better  than  no  manners 
at  all.  But  the  university  will  always  exist  in  some  form 
as  a  community  of  persons  desirous  of  pushing  their  cul- 
ture to  the  highest  pitch  they  are  capable  of,  not  as  solitary 
students  reading  in  seclusion,  but  as  members  of  a  body 
of  individuals  all  pursuing  culture,  talking  culture,  think- 
ing culture,  above  all,  criticizing  culture.  If  such  persons 
are  to  read  and  talk  and  criticize  to  any  purpose,  they 
must  know  the  world  outside  the  university  at  least  as 
well  as  the  shopkeeper  in  the  High  Street  does.  And  this 
is  just  what  they  do  not  know  at  present.  You  may  say 
of  them,  paraphrasing  Mr.  Kipling,  "  What  do  they  know 
of  Plato  that  only  Plato  know?"  If  our  universities 
would  exclude  everybody  who  had  not  earned  a  living  by 


xlviii  Parents  and  Children 

his  or  her  own  exertions  for  at  least  a  couple  of  years* 
their  effect  would  be  vastly  improved. 

The  New  Laziness 

The  child  of  the  future,  then,  if  there  is  to  be  any 
future  but  one  of  decay,  will  work  more  or  less  for  its 
living  from  an  early  age;  and  in  doing  so  it  will  not  shock 
anyone,  provided  there  be  no  longer  any  reason  to  asso- 
ciate the  conception  of  children  working  for  their  living 
with  infants  toiling  in  a  factory  for  ten  hours  a  day  or 
boys  drudging  from  nine  to  six  under  gas  lamps  in  under- 
ground city  offices.  Lads  and  lasses  in  their  teens  will 
probably  be  able  to  produce  as  much  as  the  most  ex- 
pensive person  now  costs  in  his  own  person  (it  is  retinue 
that  eats  up  the  big  income)  without  working  too  hard 
or  too  long  for  quite  as  much  happiness  as  they  can  en- 
joy. The  question  to  be  balanced  then  will  be,  not  how 
soon  people  should  be  put  to  work,  but  how  soon  they 
should  be  released  from  any  obligation  of  the  kind.  A 
life's  work  is  like  a  day's  work:  it  can  begin  early  and 
leave  off  early  or  begin  late  and  leave  off  late,  or,  as  with 
us,  begin  too  early  and  never  leave  off  at  all,  obviously 
the  worst  of  all  possible  plans.  In  any  event  we  must 
finally  reckon  work,  not  as  the  curse  our  schools  and 
prisons  and  capitalist  profit  factories  make  it  seem  today, 
but  as  a  prime  necessity  of  a  tolerable  existence.  And  if 
we  cannot  devise  fresh  wants  as  fast  as  we  develop  the 
means  of  supplying  them,  there  will  come  a  scarcity  of  the 
needed,  cut-and-dried,  appointed  work  that  is  always 
ready  to  everybody's  hand.  It  may  have  to  be  shared 
out  among  people  all  of  whom  want  more  of  it.  And  then 
a  new  sort  of  laziness  will  become  the  bugbear  of  society: 
the  laziness  that  refuses  to  face  the  mental  toil  and  ad- 
venture of  making  work  by  inventing  new  ideas  or  ex- 
tending the  domain  of  knowledge,  and  insists  on  a  ready- 


Parents  and  Children  xlix 

made  routine.  It  may  come  to  forcing  people  to  retire 
before  they  are  willing  to  make  way  for  younger  ones: 
that  is,  to  driving  all  persons  of  a  certain  age  out  of  in- 
dustry, leaving  them  to  find  something  experimental  to 
occupy  them  on  pain  of  perpetual  holiday.  Men  will 
then  try  to  spend  twenty  thousand  a  year  for  the  sake  of 
having  to  earn  it.  Instead  of  being  what  we  are  now, 
the  cheapest  and  nastiest  of  the  animals,  we  shall  be  the 
costliest,  most  fastidious,  and  best  bred.  In  short,  there 
is  no  end  to  the  astonishing  things  that  may  happen  when 
the  curse  of  Adam  becomes  first  a  blessing  and  then  an 
incurable  habit.  And  in  that  day  we  must  not  grudge 
children  their  share  of  it. 

The  Infinite  School  Task 

The  question  of  children's  work,  however,  is  only  a 
question  of  what  the  child  ought  to  do  for  the  community. 
How  highly  it  should  qualify  itself  is  another  matter. 
But  most  of  the  difficulty  of  inducing  children  to  learn 
would  disappear  if  our  demands  became  not  only  definite 
but  finite.  When  learning  is  only  an  excuse  for  imprison- 
ment, it  is  an  instrument  of  torture  which  becomes  more 
painful  the  more  progress  is  made.  Thus  when  you  have 
forced  a  child  to  learn  the  Church  Catechism,  a  docu- 
ment profound  beyond  the  comprehension  of  most  adults, 
you  are  sometimes  at  a  standstill  for  something  else  to 
teach;  and  you  therefore  keep  the  wretched  child  repeat- 
ing its  catechism  again  and  again  until  you  hit  on  the 
plan  of  making  it  learn  instalments  of  Bible  verses,  prefer- 
ably from  the  book  of  Numbers.  But  as  it  is  less  trouble 
to  set  a  lesson  that  you  know  yourself,  there  is  a  tendency 
to  keep  repeating  the  already  learnt  lesson  rather  than 
break  new  ground.  At  school  I  began  with  a  fairly  com- 
plete knowledge  of  Latin  grammar  in  the  childish  sense 
of  being  able  to  repeat  all  the  paradigms;  and  I  was  kept 


1  Parents  and  Children 

at  this,  or  rather  kept  in  a  class  where  the  master  never 
asked  me  to  do  it  because  he  knew  I  could,  and  therefore 
devoted  himself  to  trapping  the  boys  who  could  not,  until 
I  finally  forgot  most  of  it.  But  when  progress  took  place, 
what  did  it  mean?  First  it  meant  Caesar,  with  the  fore- 
knowledge that  to  master  Caesar  meant  only  being  set  at 
Virgil,  with  the  culminating  horror  of  Greek  and  Homer 
in  reserve  at  the  end  of  that.  I  preferred  Caesar,  because 
his  statement  that  Gaul  is  divided  into  three  parts,  though 
neither  interesting  nor  true,  was  the  only  Latin  sentence 
I  could  translate  at  sight:  therefore  the  longer  we  stuck 
at  Caesar  the  better  I  was  pleased.  Just  so  do  les6  classic- 
ally educated  children  see  nothing  in  the  mastery  of  ad- 
dition but  the  beginning  of  subtraction,  and  so  on  through 
multiplication  and  division  and  fractions,  with  the  black 
cloud  of  algebra  on  the  horizon.  And  if  a  boy  rushes 
through  all  that,  there  is  always  the  calculus  to  fall  back 
on,  unless  indeed  you  insist  on  his  learning  music,  and 
proceed  to  hit  him  if  he  cannot  tell  you  the  year  Beethoven 
was  born. 

A  child  has  a  right  to  finality  as  regards  its  compul- 
sory lessons.  Also  as  regards  physical  training.  At  pres- 
ent it  is  assumed  that  the  schoolmaster  has  a  right  to 
force  every  child  into  an  attempt  to  become  Porson  and 
Bentley,  Leibnitz  and  Newton,  all  rolled  into  one.  This 
is  the  tradition  of  the  oldest  grammar  schools.  In  our 
times  an  even  more  horrible  and  cynical  claim  has  been 
made  for  the  right  to  drive  boys  through  compulsory 
games  in  the  playing  fields  until  they  are  too  much  ex- 
hausted physically  to  do  anything  but  drop  off  to  sleep. 
This  is  supposed  to  protect  them  from  vice;  but  as  it  also 
protects  them  from  poetry,  literature,  music,  meditation 
and  prayer,  it  may  be  dismissed  with  the  obvious  remark 
that  if  boarding  schools  are  places  whose  keepers  are  driven 
to  such  monstrous  measures  lest  more  abominable  things 
should  happen,  then  the  sooner  boarding  schools  are  vio- 


Parents  and  Children  li 

lently  abolished  the  better.  It  is  true  that  society  may 
make  physical  claims  on  the  child  as  well  as  mental  ones: 
the  child  must  learn  to  walk,  to  use  a  knife  and  fork,  to 
swim,  to  ride  a  bicycle,  to  acquire  sufficient  power  of  self- 
defence  to  make  an  attack  on  it  an  arduous  and  uncertain 
enterprise,  perhaps  to  fly.  What  as  a  matter  of  common- 
sense  it  clearly  has  not  a  right  to  do  is  to  make  this  an 
excuse  for  keeping  the  child  slaving  for  ten  hours  at  phys- 
ical exercises  on  the  ground  that  it  is  not  yet  as  dexterous 
as  Cinquevalli  and  as  strong  as  Sandow. 

The  Rewards  and  Risks  of  Knowledge 

In  a  word,  we  have  no  right  to  insist  on  educating  a 
child;  for  its  education  can  end  only  with  its  life  and  will 
not  even  then  be  complete.  Compulsory  completion  of 
education  is  the  last  folly  of  a  rotten  and  desperate  civ- 
ilization. It  is  the  rattle  in  its  throat  before  dissolution. 
All  we  can  fairly  do  is  to  prescribe  certain  definite  ac- 
quirements and  accomplishments  as  qualifications  for 
certain  employments;  and  to  secure  them,  not  by  the 
ridiculous  method  of  inflicting  injuries  on  the  persons  who 
have  not  yet  mastered  them,  but  by  attaching  certain 
privileges  (not  pecuniary)  to  the  employments. 

Most  acquirements  carry  their  own  privileges  with 
them.  Thus  a  baby  has  to  be  pretty  closely  guarded  and 
imprisoned  because  it  cannot  take  care  of  itself.  It  has 
even  to  be  carried  about  (the  most  complete  conceivable 
infringement  of  its  liberty)  until  it  can  walk.  But  nobody 
goes  on  carrying  children  after  they  can  walk  lest  they 
should  walk  into  mischief,  though  Arab  boys  make  their 
sisters  carry  them,  as  our  own  spoiled  children  sometimes 
make  their  nurses,  out  of  mere  laziness,  because  sisters  in 
the  East  and  nurses  in  the  West  are  kept  in  servitude.  But 
in  a  society  of  equals  (the  only  reasonable  and  perma- 
nently possible  sort  of  society)  children  are  in  much  greater 


Hi  Parents  and  Children 

danger  of  acquiring  bandy  legs  through  being  left  to  walk 
before  they  are  strong  enough  than  of  being  carried  when 
they  are  well  able  to  walk.  Anyhow,  freedom  of  move- 
ment in  a  nursery  is  the  reward  of  learning  to  walk;  and 
in  precisely  the  same  way  freedom  of  movement  in  a  city 
is  the  reward  of  learning  how  to  read  public  notices,  and 
to  count  and  use  money.  The  consequences  are  of  course 
much  larger  than  the  mere  ability  to  read  the  name  of  a 
street  or  the  number  of  a  railway  platform  and  the  destina- 
tion of  a  train.  When  you  enable  a  child  to  read  these, 
you  also  enable  it  to  read  this  preface,  to  the  utter  destruc- 
tion, you  may  quite  possibly  think,  of  its  morals  and 
docility.  You  also  expose  it  to  the  danger  of  being  run 
over  by  taxicabs  and  trains.  The  moral  and  physical 
risks  of  education  are  enormous:  every  new  power  a 
child  acquires,  from  speaking,  walking,  and  co-ordinat- 
ing its  vision,  to  conquering  continents  and  founding 
religions,  opens  up  immense  new  possibilities  of  mischief. 
Teach  a  child  to  write  and  you  teach  it  how  to  forge: 
teach  it  to  speak  and  you  teach  it  how  to  lie:  teach  it 
to  walk  and  you  teach  it  how  to  kick  its  mother  to 
death. 

The  great  problem  of  slavery  for  those  whose  aim  is  to 
maintain  it  is  the  problem  of  reconciling  the  efficiency  of 
the  slave  with  the  helplessness  that  keeps  him  in  servi- 
tude; and  this  problem  is  fortunately  not  completely 
soluble;  for  it  is  not  in  fact  found  possible  for  a  duke  to 
treat  his  solicitor  or  his  doctor  as  he  treats  his  laborers, 
though  they  are  all  equally  his  slaves:  the  laborer  being 
in  fact  less  dependent  on  his  favor  than  the  professional 
man.  Hence  it  is  that  men  come  to  resent,  of  all  things, 
protection,  because  it  so  often  means  restriction  of  their 
liberty  lest  they  should  make  a  bad  use  of  it.  If  there  are 
dangerous  precipices  about,  it  is  much  easier  and  cheaper 
to  forbid  people  to  walk  near  the  edge  than  to  put  up  an 
effective  fence:  that  is  why  both  legislators  and  parents 


Parents  and  Children  liii 

and  the  paid  deputies  of  parents  are  always  inhibiting  and 
prohibiting  and  punishing  and  scolding  and  laming  and 
cramping  and  delaying  progress  and  growth  instead  of 
making  the  dangerous  places  as  safe  as  possible  and  then 
boldly  taking  and  allowing  others  to  take  the  irreducible 
minimum  of  risk. 

English    Physical    Hardihood    and    Spiritual 

Cowardice 

It  is  easier  to  convert  most  people  to  the  need  for  allow- 
ing their  children  to  run  physical  risks  than  moral  ones. 
I  can  remember  a  relative  of  mine  who,  when  I  was  a  small 
child,  unused  to  horses  and  very  much  afraid  of  them, 
insisted  on  putting  me  on  a  rather  rumbustious  pony 
with  little  spurs  on  my  heels  (knowing  that  in  my  agitation 
I  would  use  them  unconsciously),  and  being  enormously 
amused  at  my  terrors.  Yet  when  that  same  lady  discov- 
ered that  I  had  found  a  copy  of  The  Arabian  Nights  and 
was  devouring  it  with  avidity,  she  was  horrified,  and  hid 
it  away  from  me  lest  it  should  break  my  soul  as  the  pony 
might  have  broken  my  neck.  This  way  of  producing 
hardy  bodies  and  timid  souls  is  so  common  in  country 
houses  that  you  may  spend  hours  in  them  listening  to 
stories  of  broken  collar  bones,  broken  backs,  and  broken 
necks  without  coming  upon  a  single  spiritual  adventure 
or  daring  thought. 

But  whether  the  risks  to  which  liberty  exposes  us  are 
moral  or  physical  our  right  to  liberty  involves  the  right 
to  run  them.  A  man  who  is  not  free  to  risk  his  neck  as 
an  aviator  or  his  soul  as  a  heretic  is  not  free  at  all;  and  the 
right  to  liberty  begins,  not  at  the  age  of  21  years  but  of 
21  seconds. 


liv  Parents  and  Children 

The  Risks  of  Ignorance  and  Weakness 

The  difficulty  with  children  is  that  they  need  protection 
from  risks  they  are  too  young  to  understand,  and  attacks 
they  can  neither  avoid  nor  resist.  You  may  on  academic 
grounds  allow  a  child  to  snatch  glowing  coals  from  the 
fire  once.  You  will  not  do  it  twice.  The  risks  of  liberty 
we  must  let  everyone  take;  but  the  risks  of  ignorance  and 
self-helplessness  are  another  matter.  Not  only  children 
but  adults  need  protection  from  them.  At  present  adults 
are  often  exposed  to  risks  outside  their  knowledge  or 
beyond  their  comprehension  or  powers  of  resistance  or 
foresight:  for  example,  we  have  to  look  on  every  day  at 
marriages  or  financial  speculations  that  may  involve  far 
worse  consequences  than  burnt  fingers.  And  just  as  it 
is  part  of  the  business  of  adults  to  protect  children,  to 
feed  them,  clothe  them,  shelter  them,  and  shift  for  them 
in  all  sorts  of  ways  until  they  are  able  to  shift  for  them- 
selves, it  is  coming  more  and  more  to  be  seen  that  this  is 
true  not  only  of  the  relation  between  adults  and  children, 
but  between  adults  and  adults.  We  shall  not  always  look 
on  indifferently  at  foolish  marriages  and  financial  specu- 
lations, nor  allow  dead  men  to  control  live  communities 
by  ridiculous  wills  and  living  heirs  to  squander  and  ruin 
great  estates,  nor  tolerate  a  hundred  other  absurd  lib- 
erties that  we  allow  today  because  we  are  too  lazy  to  find 
out  the  proper  way  to  interfere.  But  the  interference  must 
be  regulated  by  some  theory  of  the  individual's  rights. 
Though  the  right  to  live  is  absolute,  it  is  not  unconditional. 
If  a  man  is  unbearably  mischievous,  he  must  be  killed. 
This  is  a  mere  matter  of  necessity,  like  the  killing  of  a 
man-eating  tiger  in  a  nursery,  a  venomous  snake  in  the 
garden,  or  a  fox  in  the  poultry  yard.  No  society  could  be 
constructed  on  the  assumption  that  such  extermination 
is  a  violation  of  the  creature's  right  to  live,  and  therefore 
must  not  be  allowed.    And  then  at  once  arises  the  danger 


Parents  and  Children  lv 

into  which  morality  has  led  us:  the  danger  of  persecution. 
One  Christian  spreading  his  doctrines  may  seem  more 
mischievous  than  a  dozen  thieves:  throw  him  therefore  to 
the  lions.  A  lying  or  disobedient  child  may  corrupt  a 
whole  generation  and  make  human  Society  impossible: 
therefore  thrash  the  vice  out  of  him.  And  so  on  until  our 
whole  system  of  abortion,  intimidation,  tyranny,  cruelty 
and  the  rest  is  in  full  swing  again. 

The  Common  Sense  of  Toleration 

The  real  safeguard  against  this  is  the  dogma  of  Tolera- 
tion. I  need  not  here  repeat  the  compact  treatise  on  it 
which  I  prepared  for  the  Joint  Committee  on  the  Censor- 
ship of  Stage  Plays,  and  prefixed  to  The  Shewing  Up  of 
Blanco  Posnet.  It  must  suffice  now  to  say  that  the  present 
must  not  attempt  to  schoolmaster  the  future  by  pretend- 
ing to  know  good  from  evil  in  tendency,  or  protect  citizens 
against  shocks  to  their  opinions  and  convictions,  moral, 
political  or  religious:  in  other  words  it  must  not  persecute 
doctrines  of  any  kind,  or  what  is  called  bad  taste,  and 
must  insist  on  all  persons  facing  such  shocks  as  they  face 
frosty  weather  or  any  of  the  other  disagreeable,  dangerous, 
or  bracing  incidents  of  freedom.  The  expediency  of  Tol- 
eration has  been  forced  on  us  by  the  fact  that  progressive 
enlightenment  depends  on  a  fair  hearing  for  doctrines 
which  at  first  appear  seditious,  blasphemous,  and  immoral, 
and  which  deeply  shock  people  who  never  think  originally, 
thought  being  with  them  merely  a  habit  and  an  echo. 
The  deeper  ground  for  Toleration  is  the  nature  of  creation, 
which,  as  we  now  know,  proceeds  by  evolution.  Evolu- 
tion finds  its  way  by  experiment;  and  this  finding  of  the 
way  varies  according  to  the  stage  of  development  reached, 
from  the  blindest  groping  along  the  line  of  least  resistance 
to  intellectual  speculation,  with  its  practical  sequel  of 
hypothesis  and  experimental  verification;  or  to  observa- 


lvi  Parents  and  Children 

tion,  induction,  and  deduction;  or  even  into  so  rapid  and 
intuitive  an  integration  of  all  these  processes  in  a  single 
brain  that  we  get  the  inspired  guess  of  the  man  of  genius 
and  the  desperate  resolution  of  the  teacher  of  new  truths 
who  is  first  slain  as  a  blasphemous  apostate  and  then 
worshipped  as  a  prophet. 

Here  the  law  for  the  child  is  the  same  as  for  the  adult. 
The  high  priest  must  not  rend  his  garments  and  cry 
"Crucify  him"  when  he  is  shocked:  the  atheist  must  not 
clamor  for  the  suppression  of  Law's  Serious  Call  because 
it  has  for  two  centuries  destroyed  the  natural  happiness 
of  innumerable  unfortunate  children  by  persuading  their 
parents  that  it  is  their  religious  duty  to  be  miserable.  It, 
and  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  and  Machiavelli's  Prince, 
and  La  Rochefoucauld's  maxims,  and  Hymns  Ancient  and 
Modern,  and  De  Glanville's  apologue,  and  Dr.  Watts's 
rhymes,  and  Nietzsche's  Gay  Science,  and  Ingersoll's 
Mistakes  of  Moses,  and  the  speeches  and  pamphlets  of 
the  people  who  want  us  to  make  war  on  Germany,  and 
the  Noodle's  Orations  and  articles  of  our  politicians  and 
journalists,  must  all  be  tolerated  not  only  because  any 
of  them  may  for  all  we  know  be  on  the  right  track  but 
because  it  is  in  the  conflict  of  opinion  that  we  win  knowl- 
edge and  wisdom.  However  terrible  the  wounds  suffered 
in  that  conflict,  they  are  better  than  the  barren  peace  of 
death  that  follows  when  all  the  combatants  are  slaughtered 
or  bound  hand  and  foot. 

The  difficulty  at  present  is  that  though  this  necessity 
for  Toleration  is  a  law  of  political  science  as  well  established 
as  the  law  of  gravitation,  our  rulers  are  never  taught 
political  science:  on  the  contrary,  they  are  taught  in  school 
that  the  master  tolerates  nothing  that  is  disagreeable  to 
him;  that  ruling  is  simply  being  master;  and  that  the  mas- 
ter's method  is  the  method  of  violent  punishment.  And 
our  citizens,  all  school  taught,  are  walking  in  the  same 
darkness.     As  I  write  these  lines  the  Home  Secretary  is 


Parents  and  Children  lvii 

explaining  that  a  man  who  has  been  imprisoned  for  blas- 
phemy must  not  be  released  because  his  remarks  were 
painful  to  the  feelings  of  his  pious  fellow  townsmen.  Now 
it  happens  that  this  very  Home  Secretary  has  driven 
many  thousands  of  his  fellow  citizens  almost  beside  them- 
selves by  the  crudity  of  his  notions  of  government,  and 
his  simple  inability  to  understand  why  he  should  not  use 
and  make  laws  to  torment  and  subdue  people  who  do  not 
happen  to  agree  with  him.  In  a  word,  he  is  not  a  politician, 
but  a  grown-up  schoolboy  who  has  at  last  got  a  cane  in 
his  hand.  And  as  all  the  rest  of  us  are  in  the  same  condi- 
tion (except  as  to  command  of  the  cane)  the  only  objection 
made  to  his  proceedings  takes  the  shape  of  clamorous 
demands  that  he  should  be  caned  instead  of  being  allowed 
to  cane  other  people. 

The  Sin  of  Athanasius 

It  seems  hopeless.  Anarchists  are  tempted  to  preach  a 
violent  and  implacable  resistance  to  all  law  as  the  only 
remedy;  and  the  result  of  that  speedily  is  that  people 
welcome  any  tyranny  that  will  rescue  them  from  chaos. 
But  there  is  really  no  need  to  choose  between  anarchy 
and  tyranny.  A  quite  reasonable  state  of  things  is  prac- 
ticable if  we  proceed  on  human  assumptions  and  not 
on  academic  ones.  If  adults  will  frankly  give  up  their 
claim  to  know  better  than  children  what  the  purposes  of 
the  Life  Force  are,  and  treat  the  child  as  an  experiment 
like  themselves,  and  possibly  a  more  successful  one,  and 
at  the  same  time  relinquish  their  monstrous  parental 
claims  to  personal  private  property  in  children,  the  rest 
must  be  left  to  common  sense.  It  is  our  attitude,  our 
religion,  that  is  wrong.  A  good  beginning  might  be  made 
by  enacting  that  any  person  dictating  a  piece  of  conduct 
to  a  child  or  to  anyone  else  as  the  will  of  God,  or  as  ab- 
solutely right,  should  be  dealt  with  as  a  blasphemer:  as, 


lviii  Parents  and  Children 

indeed,  guilty  of  the  unpardonable  sin  against  the  Holy 
Ghost.  If  the  penalty  were  death,  it  would  rid  us  at  once 
of  that  scourge  of  humanity,  the  amateur  Pope.  As  an 
Irish  Protestant,  I  raise  the  cry  of  No  Popery  with  hered- 
itary zest.  We  are  overrun  with  Popes.  From  curates 
and  governesses,  who  may  claim  a  sort  of  professional 
standing,  to  parents  and  uncles  and  nurserymaids  and 
school  teachers  and  wiseacres  generally,  there  are  scores 
of  thousands  of  human  insects  groping  through  our  dark- 
ness by  the  feeble  phosphorescence  of  their  own  tails, 
yet  ready  at  a  moment's  notice  to  reveal  the  will  of  God 
on  every  possible  subject;  to  explain  how  and  why  the 
universe  was  made  (in  my  youth  they  added  the  exact 
date)  and  the  circumstances  under  which  it  will  cease  to 
exist;  to  lay  down  precise  rules  of  right  and  wrong  con- 
duct; to  discriminate  infallibly  between  virtuous  and  vi- 
cious character;  and  all  this  with  such  certainty  that  they 
are  prepared  to  visit  all  the  rigors  of  the  law,  and  all  the 
ruinous  penalties  of  social  ostracism  on  people,  however 
harmless  their  actions  maybe  who  venture  to  laugh 
at  their  monstrous  conceit  or  to  pay  their  assumptions 
the  extravagant  compliment  of  criticizing  them.  As  to 
children,  who  shall  say  what  canings  and  birchings  and 
terrifyings  and  threats  of  hell  fire  and  impositions  and 
humiliations  and  petty  imprisonings  and  sendings  to  bed 
and  standing  in  corners  and  the  like  they  have  suffered 
because  their  parents  and  guardians  and  teachers  knew 
everything  so  much  better  than  Socrates  or  Solon? 

It  is  this  ignorant  uppishness  that  does  the  mischief. 
A  stranger  on  the  planet  might  expect  that  its  grotesque 
absurdity  would  provoke  enough  ridicule  to  cure  it;  but 
unfortunately  quite  the  contrary  happens.  Just  as  our 
ill  health  delivers  us  into  the  hands  of  medical  quacks  and 
creates  a  passionate  demand  for  impudent  pretences  that 
doctors  can  cure  the  diseases  they  themselves  die  of  daily, 
so  our  ignorance  and  helplessness  set  us  clamoring  for 


Parents  and  Children  lix 

spiritual  and  moral  quacks  who  pretend  that  they  can 
save  our  souls  from  their  own  damnation.  If  a  doctor  were 
to  say  to  his  patients,  "I  am  familiar  with  your  symp- 
toms, because  I  have  seen  other  people  in  your  condition; 
and  I  will  bring  the  very  little  knowledge  we  have  to  your 
treatment;  but  except  in  that  very  shallow  sense  I  dont 
know  what  is  the  matter  with  you;  and  I  cant  undertake 
to  cure  you,"  he  would  be  a  lost  man  professionally;  and  if 
a  clergyman,  on  being  called  on  to  award  a  prize  for  good 
conduct  in  the  village  school,  were  to  say,  "I  am  afraid 
I  cannot  say  who  is  the  best-behaved  child,  because  I 
really  do  not  know  what  good  conduct  is;  but  I  will  gladly 
take  the  teacher's  word  as  to  which  child  has  caused  least 
inconvenience,"  he  would  probably  be  unfrocked,  if  not 
excommunicated.  And  yet  no  honest  and  intellectually 
capable  doctor  or  parson  can  say  more.  Clearly  it  would 
not  be  wise  of  the  doctor  to  say  it,  because  optimistic  lies 
have  such  immense  therapeutic  value  that  a  doctor  who 
cannot  tell  them  convincingly  has  mistaken  his  profession. 
And  a  clergyman  who  is  not  prepared  to  lay  down  the 
law  dogmatically  will  not  be  of  much  use  in  a  village 
school,  though  it  behoves  him  all  the  more  to  be  very 
careful  what  law  he  lays  down.  But  unless  both  the 
clergyman  and  the  doctor  are  in  the  attitude  expressed 
by  these  speeches  they  are  not  fit  for  their  work.  The 
man  who  believes  that  he  has  morei  than  a  provisional 
hypothesis  to  go  upon  is  a  born  fool.  He  may  have  to  act 
vigorously  on  it.  The  world  has  no  use  for  the  Agnostic 
who  wont  believe  anything  because  anything  might  be 
false,  and  wont  deny  anything  because  anything  might 
be  true.  But  there  is  a  wide  difference  between  saying, 
"I  believe  this;  and  I  am  going  to  act  on  it,"  or,  "I  dont 
believe  it;  and  I  wont  act  on  it,"  and  saying,  "It  is  true; 
and  it  is  my  duty  and  yours  to  act  on  it,"  or,  "It  is  false; 
and  it  is  my  duty  and  yours  to  refuse  to  act  on  it."  The 
difference  is  as  great  as  that  between  the  Apostles'  Creed 


lx  Parents  and  Children 

and  the  Athanasian  Creed.  When  you  repeat  the  Apostles' 
Creed  you  affirm  that  you  believe  certain  things.  There 
you  are  clearly  within  your  rights.  When  you  repeat  the 
Athanasian  Creed,  you  affirm  that  certain  things  are  so, 
and  that  anybody  who  doubts  that  they  are  so  cannot  be 
saved.  And  this  is  simply  a  piece  of  impudence  on  your 
part,  as  you  know  nothing  about  it  except  that  as  good 
men  as  you  have  never  heard  of  your  creed.  The  apostolic 
attitude  is  a  desire  to  convert  others  to  our  beliefs  for  the 
sake  of  sympathy  and  light:  the  Athanasian  attitude  is  a 
desire  to  murder  people  who  dont  agree  with  us.  I  am 
sufficient  of  an  Athanasian  to  advocate  a  law  for  the  speedy 
execution  of  all  Athanasians,  because  they  violate  the 
fundamental  proposition  of  my  creed,  which  is,  I  repeat, 
that  all  living  creatures  are  experiments.  The  precise 
formula  for  the  Superman,  ci-devant  The  Just  Man  Made 
Perfect,  has  not  yet  been  discovered.  Until  it  is,  every 
birth  is  an  experiment  in  the  Great  Research  which 
is  being  conducted  by  the  Life  Force  to  discover  that 
formula. 

The  Experiment  Experimenting 

And  now  all  the  modern  schoolmaster  abortionists  will 
rise  up  beaming,  and  say,  "We  quite  agree.  We  regard 
every  child  in  our  school  as  a  subject  for  experiment.  We 
are  always  experimenting  with  them.  We  challenge  the 
experimental  test  for  our  system.  We  are  continually 
guided  by  our  experience  in  our  great  work  of  moulding 
the  character  of  our  future  citizens,  etc.  etc.  etc."  I  am 
sorry  to  seem  irreconcilable;  but  it  is  the  Life  Force  that 
has  to  make  the  experiment  and  not  the  schoolmaster; 
and  the  Life  Force  for  the  child's  purpose  is  in  the  child 
and  not  in  the  schoolmaster.  The  schoolmaster  is  another 
experiment;  and  a  laboratory  in  which  all  the  experiments 
began  experimenting  on  one  another  would  not  produce 
intelligible  results.     I  admit,  however,  that  if  my  school- 


Parents  and  Children  lxi 

masters  had  treated  me  as  an  experiment  of  the  Life 
Force:  that  is,  if  they  had  set  me  free  to  do  as  I  liked  sub- 
ject only  to  my  political  rights  and  theirs,  they  could  not 
have  watched  the  experiment  very  long,  because  the  first 
result  would  have  been  a  rapid  movement  on  my  part  in 
the  direction  of  the  door,  and  my  disappearance  there- 
through. 

It  may  be  worth  inquiring  where  I  should  have  gone 
to.  I  should  say  that  practical^'  every  time  I  should 
have  gone  to  a  much  more  educational  place.  I  should 
have  gone  into  the  country,  or  into  the  sea,  or  into  the 
National  Gallery,  or  to  hear  a  band  if  there  was  one,  or 
to  any  library  where  there  were  no  schoolbooks.  I  should 
have  read  very  dry  and  difficult  books:  for  example,  though 
nothing  would  have  induced  me  to  read  the  budget  of 
stupid  party  lies  that  served  as  a  text-book  of  history  in 
school,  I  remember  reading  Robertson's  Charles  V.  and 
his  history  of  Scotland  from  end  to  end  most  laboriously. 
Once,  stung  by  the  airs  of  a  schoolfellow  who  alleged  that 
he  had  read  Locke  On  The  Human  Understanding,  I  at- 
tempted to  read  the  Bible  straight  through,  and  actually 
got  to  the  Pauline  Epistles  before  I  broke  down  in  disgust 
at  what  seemed  to  me  their  inveterate  crookedness  of 
mind.  If  there  had  been  a  school  where  children  were 
really  free,  I  should  have  had  to  be  driven  out  of  it  for 
the  sake  of  my  health  by  the  teachers;  for  the  children 
to  whom  a  literary  education  can  be  of  any  use  are  in- 
satiable: they  will  read  and  study  far  more  than  is  good 
for  them.  In  fact  the  real  difficulty  is  to  prevent  them 
from  wasting  their  time  by  reading  for  the  sake  of  reading 
and  studying  for  the  sake  of  studying,  instead  of  taking 
some  trouble  to  find  out  what  they  really  like  and  are 
capable  of  doing  some  good  at.  Some  silly  person  will 
probably  interrupt  me  here  with  the  remark  that  many 
children  have  no  appetite  for  a  literary  education  at  all, 
and  would  never  open  a  book  if  they  were  not  forced  to. 


lxii  Parents  and  Children 

I  have  known  many  such  persons  who  have  been  forced 
to  the  point  of  obtaining  University  degrees.  And  for  all 
the  effect  their  literary  exercises  has  left  on  them  they 
might  just  as  well  have  been  put  on  the  treadmill.  In 
fact  they  are  actually  less  literate  than  the  treadmill 
would  have  left  them;  for  they  might  by  chance  have 
picked  up  and  dipped  into  a  volume  of  Shakespear  or  a 
translation  of  Homer  if  they  had  not  been  driven  to  loathe 
every  famous  name  in  literature.  I  should  probably  know 
as  much  Latin  as  French,  if  Latin  had  not  been  made  the 
excuse  for  my  school  imprisonment  and  degradation. 

Why  We  Loathe  Learning  and  Love  Sport 

If  we  are  to  discuss  the  importance  of  art,  learning, 
and  intellectual  culture,  the  first  thing  we  have  to  recog- 
nize is  that  we  have  very  little  of  them  at  present;  and 
that  this  little  has  not  been  produced  by  compulsory  edu- 
cation: nay,  that  the  scarcity  is  unnatural  and  has  been 
produced  by  the  violent  exclusion  of  art  and  artists  from 
schools.  On  the  other  hand  we  have  quite  a  considerable 
degree  of  bodily  culture:  indeed  there  is  a  continual  outcry 
against  the  sacrifice  of  mental  accomplishments  to  ath- 
letics. In  other  words  a  sacrifice  of  the  professed  object 
of  compulsory  education  to  the  real  object  of  voluntary 
education.  It  is  assumed  that  this  means  that  people 
prefer  bodily  to  mental  culture;  but  may  it  not  mean  that 
they  prefer  liberty  and  satisfaction  to  coercion  and  pri- 
vation. Why  is  it  that  people  who  have  been  taught 
Shakespear  as  a  school  subject  loathe  his  plays  and  cannot 
by  any  means  be  persuaded  ever  to  open  his  works  after 
they  escape  from  school,  whereas  there  is  still,  300  years 
after  his  death,  a  wide  and  steady  sale  for  his  works  to 
people  who  read  his  plays  as  plays,  and  not  as  task  work? 
If  Shakespear,  or  for  that  matter,  Newton  and  Leibnitz, 
are  allowed  to  find  their  readers  and  students  they  will 


Parents  and  Children  lxiii 

find  them.  If  their  works  are  annotated  and  paraphrased 
by  dullards,  and  the  annotations  and  paraphrases  forced 
on  all  young  people  by  imprisonment  and  flogging  and 
scolding,  there  will  not  be  a  single  man  of  letters  or  higher 
mathematician  the  more  in  the  country:  on  the  contrary 
there  will  be  less,  as  so  many  potential  lovers  of  literature 
and  mathematics  will  have  been  incurably  prejudiced 
against  them.  Everyone  who  is  conversant  with  the  class 
in  which  child  imprisonment  and  compulsory  schooling 
is  carried  out  to  the  final  extremity  of  the  university  de- 
gree knows  that  its  scholastic  culture  is  a  sham;  that  it 
knows  little  about  literature  or  art  and  a  great  deal  about 
point-to-point  races;  and  that  the  village  cobbler,  who 
has  never  read  a  page  of  Plato,  and  is  admittedly  a  dan- 
gerously ignorant  man  politically,  is  nevertheless  a  Soc- 
rates compared  to  the  classically  educated  gentlemen  who 
discuss  politics  in  country  houses  at  election  time  (and 
at  no  other  time)  after  their  day's  earnest  and  skilful 
shooting.  Think  of  the  years  and  years  of  weary  torment 
the  women  of  the  piano-possessing  class  have  been  forced 
to  spend  over  the  keyboard,  fingering  scales.  How  many 
of  them  could  be  bribed  to  attend  a  pianoforte  recital 
by  a  great  player,  though  they  will  rise  from  sick  beds 
rather  than  miss  Ascot  or  Goodwood? 

Another  familiar  fact  that  teaches  the  same  lesson  is 
that  many  women  who  have  voluntarily  attained  a  high 
degree  of  culture  cannot  add  up  their  own  housekeeping 
books,  though  their  education  in  simple  arithmetic  was 
compulsory,  whereas  their  higher  education  has  been 
wholly  voluntary.  Everywhere  we  find  the  same  result. 
The  imprisonment,  the  beating,  the  taming  and  laming,  the 
breaking  of  young  spirits,  the  arrest  of  development,  the 
atrophy  of  all  inhibitive  power  except  the  power  of  fear, 
are  real:  the  education  is  sham.  Those  who  have  been 
taught  most  know  least. 


lxiv  Parents  and  Children 

Antichrist 

Among  the  worst  effects  of  the  unnatural  segregation  of 
children  in  schools  and  the  equally  unnatural  constant  as- 
sociation of  them  with  adults  in  the  family  is  the  utter 
defeat  of  the  vital  element  in  Christianity.  Christ  stands 
in  the  world  for  that  intuition  of  the  highest  humanity 
that  we,  being  members  one  of  another,  must  not  com- 
plain, must  not  scold,  must  not  strike,  nor  revile  nor  per- 
secute nor  revenge  nor  punish.  Now  family  life  and  school 
life  are,  as  far  as  the  moral  training  of  children  is  concerned, 
nothing  but  the  deliberate  inculcation  of  a  routine  of  com- 
plaint, scolding,  punishment,  persecution,  and  revenge  as 
the  natural  and  only  possible  way  of  dealing  with  evil  or 
inconvenience.  "Aint  nobody  to  be  whopped  for  this 
here?"  exclaimed  Sam  Weller  when  he  saw  his  employer's 
name  written  up  on  a  stage  coach,  and  conceived  the  phe- 
nomenon as  an  insult  which  reflected  on  himself.  This 
exclamation  of  Sam  Weller  is  at  once  the  negation  of 
Christianity  and  the  beginning  and  the  end  of  current 
morality;  and  so  it  will  remain  as  long  as  the  family  and 
the  school  persist  as  we  know  them :  that  is,  as  long  as  the 
rights  of  children  are  so  utterly  denied  that  nobody  will 
even  take  the  trouble  to  ascertain  what  they  are,  and  com- 
ing of  age  is  like  the  turning  of  a  convict  into  the  street 
after  twenty-one  years  penal  servitude.  Indeed  it  is  worse; 
for  the  convict  may  have  learnt  before  his  conviction  how 
to  live  in  freedom  and  may  remember  how  to  set  about  it, 
however  lamed  his  powers  of  freedom  may  have  become 
through  disuse;  but  the  child  knows  no  other  way  of  life 
but  the  slave's  way.  Born  free,  as  Rousseau  says,  he  has 
been  laid  hands  on  by  slaves  from  the  moment  of  his  birth 
and  brought  up  as  a  slave.  How  is  he,  when  he  is  at  last 
set  free,  to  be  anything  else  than  the  slave  he  actually 
is,  clamoring  for  war,  for  the  lash,  for  police,  prisons,  and 
scaffolds  in  a  wild  panic  of  delusion  that  without  these 


Parents  and  Children  lxv 

things  he  is  lost.  The  grown-up  Englishman  is  to  the  end 
of  his  days  a  badly  brought-up  child,  beyond  belief  quar- 
relsome, petulant,  selfish,  destructive,  and  cowardly: 
afraid  that  the  Germans  will  come  and  enslave  him;  that 
the  burglar  will  come  and  rob  him;  that  the  bicycle  or 
motor  car  will  run  over  him;  that  the  smallpox  will  attack 
him;  and  that  the  devil  will  run  away  with  him  and  empty 
him  out  like  a  sack  of  coals  on  a  blazing  fire  unless  his 
nurse  or  his  parents  or  his  schoolmaster  or  his  bishop  or 
his  judge  or  his  army  or  his  navy  will  do  something  to 
frighten  these  bad  things  away.  And  this  Englishman, 
without  the  moral  courage  of  a  louse,  will  risk  his  neck  for 
fun  fifty  times  every  winter  in  the  hunting  field,  and  at 
Badajos  sieges  and  the  like  will  ram  his  head  into  a  hole 
bristling  with  sword  blades  rather  than  be  beaten  in  the 
one  department  in  which  he  has  been  brought  up  to  con- 
sult his  own  honor.  As  a  Sportsman  (and  war  is  funda- 
mentally the  sport  of  hunting  and  fighting  the  most 
dangerous  of  the  beasts  of  prey)  he  feels  free.  He  will 
tell  you  himself  that  the  true  sportsman  is  never  a  snob,  a 
coward,  a  duffer,  a  cheat,  a  thief,  or  a  liar.  Curious,  is  it 
not,  that  he  has  not  the  same  confidence  in  other  sorts  of 
man? 

And  even  sport  is  losing  its  freedom.  Soon  everybody 
will  be  schooled,  mentally  and  physically,  from  the  cradle 
to  the  end  of  the  term  of  adult  compulsory  military  serv- 
ice, and  finally  of  compulsory  civil  service  lasting  until 
the  age  of  superannuation.  Always  more  schooling,  more 
compulsion.  We  are  to  be  cured  by  an  excess  of  the  dose 
that  has  poisoned  us.     Satan  is  to  cast  out  Satan. 

Under  the  Whip 

Clearly  this  will  not  do.  We  must  reconcile  education 
with  liberty.  We  must  find  out  some  means  of  making 
men  workers  and,  if  need  be,   warriors,   without  making 


lxvi  Parents  and  Children 

them  slaves.  We  must  cultivate  the  noble  virtues  that 
have  their  root  in  pride.  Now  no  schoolmaster  will  teach 
these  any  more  than  a  prison  governor  will  teach  his  pris- 
oners how  to  mutiny  and  escape.  Self-preservation  forces 
him  to  break  the  spirit  that  revolts  against  him,  and  to 
inculcate  submission,  even  to  obscene  assault,  as  a  duty. 
A  bishop  once  had  the  hardihood  to  say  that  he  would 
rather  see  England  free  than  England  sober.  Nobody  has 
yet  dared  to  say  that  he  would  rather  see  an  England  of 
ignoramuses  than  an  England  of  cowards  and  slaves. 
And  if  anyone  did,  it  would  be  necessary  to  point  out  that 
the  antithesis  is  not  a  practical  one,  as  we  have  got  at 
present  an  England  of  ignoramuses  who  are  also  cowards 
and  slaves,  and  extremely  proud  of  it  at  that,  because  in 
school  they  are  taught  to  submit,  with  what  they  ridicu- 
lously call  Oriental  fatalism  (as  if  any  Oriental  has  ever 
submitted  more  helplessly  and  sheepishly  to  robbery  and 
oppression  than  we  Occidentals  do),  to  be  driven  day  after 
day  into  compounds  and  set  to  the  tasks  they  loathe  by 
the  men  they  hate  and  fear,  as  if  this  were  the  inevitable 
destiny  of  mankind.  And  naturally,  when  they  grow  up, 
they  helplessly  exchange  the  prison  of  the  school  for  the 
prison  of  the  mine  or  the  workshop  or  the  office,  and 
drudge  along  stupidly  and  miserably,  with  just  enough 
gregarious  instinct  to  turn  furiously  on  any  intelligent 
person  who  proposes  a  change.  It  would  be  quite  easy 
to  make  England  a  paradise,  according  to  our  present 
ideas,  in  a  few  years.  There  is  no  mystery  about  it:  the 
way  has  been  pointed  out  over  and  over  again.  The 
difficulty  is  not  the  way  but  the  will.  And  we  have  no 
will  because  the  first  thing  done  with  us  in  childhood  was 
to  break  our  will.  Can  anything  be  more  disgusting  than 
the  spectacle  of  a  nation  reading  the  biography  of  Glad- 
stone and  gloating  over  the  account  of  how  he  was  flogged 
at  Eton,  two  of  his  schoolfellows  being  compelled  to  hold 
him  down  whilst  he  was  flogged.     Not  long  ago  a  public 


Parents  and  Children  lxvii 

body  in  England  had  to  deal  with  the  case  of  a  school- 
master who,  conceiving  himself  insulted  by  the  smoking 
of  a  cigaret  against  his  orders  by  a  pupil  eighteen  years 
old,  proposed  to  flog  him  publicly  as  a  satisfaction  to  what 
he  called  his  honor  and  authority.  I  had  intended  to  give 
the  particulars  of  this  case,  but  find  the  drudgery  of  re- 
peating such  stuff  too  sickening,  and  the  effect  unjust  to 
a  man  who  was  doing  only  what  others  all  over  the  coun- 
try were  doing  as  part  of  the  established  routine  of  what 
is  called  education.  The  astounding  part  of  it  was  the 
manner  in  which  the  person  to  whom  this  outrage  on 
decency  seemed  quite  proper  and  natural  claimed  to  be 
a  functionary  of  high  character,  and  had  his  claim  al- 
lowed. In  Japan  he  would  hardly  have  been  allowed  the 
privilege  of  committing  suicide.  What  is  to  be  said  of  a 
profession  in  which  such  obscenities  are  made  points  of 
honor,  or  of  institutions  in  which  they  are  an  accepted 
part  of  the  daily  routine?  Wholesome  people  would  not 
argue  about  the  taste  of  such  nastinesses:  they  would  spit 
them  out;  but  we  are  tainted  with  flagellomania  from 
our  childhood.  When  will  we  realize  that  the  fact  that 
we  can  become  accustomed  to  anything,  however  dis- 
gusting at  first,  makes  it  necessary  for  us  to  examine 
carefully  everything  we  have  become  accustomed  to? 
Before  motor  cars  became  common,  necessity  had  accus- 
tomed us  to  a  foulness  in  our  streets  which  would  ha»re 
horrified  us  had  the  street  been  our  drawing-room  carpet. 
Before  long  we  shall  be  as  particular  about  our  streets  as 
we  now  are  about  our  carpets;  and  their  condition  in  the 
nineteenth  century  will  become  as  forgotten  and  incred- 
ible as  the  condition  of  the  corridors  of  palaces  and  the 
courts  of  castles  was  as  late  as  the  eighteenth  century. 
This  foulness,  we  can  plead,  was  imposed  on  us  as  a  ne- 
cessity by  the  use  of  horses  and  of  huge  retinues;  but 
flogging  has  never  been  so  imposed:  it  has  always  been  a 
vice,  craved  for  on  any  pretext  by  those  depraved  by  it. 


lxviii  Parents  and  Children 

Boys  were  flogged  when  criminals  were  hanged,  to  impress 
the  awful  warning  on  them.  Boys  were  flogged  at  bound- 
aries, to  impress  the  boundaries  on  their  memory.  Other 
methods  and  other  punishments  were  always  available: 
the  choice  of  this  one  betrayed  the  sensual  impulse  which 
makes  the  practice  an  abomination.  But  when  its  vicious- 
ness  made  it  customary,  it  was  practised  and  tolerated 
on  all  hands  by  people  who  were  innocent  of  anything 
worse  than  stupidity,  ill  temper,  and  inability  to  discover 
other  methods  of  maintaining  order  than  those  they  had 
always  seen  practised  and  approved  of.  From  children 
and  animals  it  extended  to  slaves  and  criminals.  In  the 
days  of  Moses  it  was  limited  to  39  lashes.  In  the 
early  nineteenth  century  it  had  become  an  open  madness: 
soldiers  were  sentenced  to  a  thousand  lashes  for  trifling 
offences,  with  the  result  (among  others  less  men tionable) 
that  the  Iron  Duke  of  Wellington  complained  that  it  was 
impossible  to  get  an  order  obeyed  in  the  British  army 
except  in  two  or  three  crack  regiments.  Such  frantic 
excesses  of  this  disgusting  neurosis  provoked  a  reaction 
against  it;  but  the  clamor  for  it  by  depraved  persons  never 
ceased,  and  was  tolerated  by  a  nation  trained  to  it  from 
childhood  in  the  schools  until  last  year  (1913),  when  in 
what  must  be  described  as  a  paroxysm  of  sexual  excite- 
ment provoked  by  the  agitation  concerning  the -White 
Slave  Traffic  (the  purely  commercial  nature  of  which  I 
was  prevented  from  exposing  on  the  stage  by  the  Censor- 
ship twenty  years  ago)  the  Government  yielded  to  an 
outcry  for  flagellation  led  by  the  Archbishop  of  Canter- 
bury, and  passed  an  Act  under  which  a  judge  can  sentence 
a  man  to  be  flogged  to  the  utmost  extremity  with  any 
instrument  usable  for  such  a  purpose  that  he  cares  to 
prescribe.  Such  an  Act  is  not  a  legislative  phenomenon 
but  a  psychopathic  one.  Its  effect  on  the  White  Slave 
Traffic  was,  of  course,  to  distract  public  attention  from 
its  real  cause  and  from  the  people  who  really  profit  by  it 


Parents  and  Children  lxix 

to  imaginary  "foreign  scoundrels,"  and  to  secure  a  monop- 
oly of  its  organization  for  women. 

And  all  this  evil  is  made  possible  by  the  schoolmaster 
with  his  cane  and  birch,  by  the  parents  getting  rid  as  best 
they  can  of  the  nuisance  of  children  making  noise  and 
mischief  in  the  house,  and  by  the  denial  to  children  of  the 
elementary  rights  of  human  beings. 

The  first  man  who  enslaved  and  "broke  in"  an  animal 
with  a  whip  would  have  invented  the  explosion  engine 
instead  could  he  have  foreseen  the  curse  he  was  laying  on 
his  race.  For  men  and  women  learnt  thereby  to  enslave 
and  break  in  their  children  by  the  same  means.  These 
children,  grown  up,  knew  no  other  methods  of  training. 
Finally  the  evil  that  was  done  for  gain  by  the  greedy  was 
refined  on  and  done  for  pleasure  by  the  lustful.  Flogging 
has  become  a  pleasure  purchasable  in  our  streets,  and 
inhibition  a  grown-up  habit  that  children  play  at.  "Go 
and  see  what  baby  is  doing;  and  tell  him  he  mustnt"  is 
the  last  word  of  the  nursery;  and  the  grimmest  aspect  of 
it  is  that  it  was  first  formulated  by  a  comic  paper  as  a 
capital  joke. 

Technical  Instruction 

Technical  instruction  tempts  to  violence  (as  a  short 
cut)  more  than  liberal  education.  The  sailor  in  Mr 
Rudyard  Kipling's  Captains  Courageous,  teaching  the 
boy  the  names  of  the  ship's  tackle  with  a  rope's  end,  does 
not  disgust  us  as  our  schoolmasters  do,  especially  as  the 
boy  was  a  spoiled  boy.  But  an  unspoiled  boy  would  not 
have  needed  that  drastic  medicine.  Technical  training 
may  be  as  tedious  as  learning  to  skate  or  to  play  the  piano 
or  violin;  but  it  is  the  price  one  must  pay  to  achieve  cer- 
tain desirable  results  or  necessary  ends.  It  is  a  monstrous 
thing  to  force  a  child  to  learn  Latin  or  Greek  or  mathe- 
matics on  the  ground  that  they  are  an  indispensable  gym- 
nastic for  the   mental  powers.     It  would  be  monstrous 


lxx  Parents  and  Children 

even  if  it  were  true;  for  there  is  no  labor  that  might  not 
be  imposed  on  a  child  or  an  adult  on  the  same  pretext; 
but  as  a  glance  at  the  average  products  of  our  public 
school  and  university  education  shews  that  it  is  not  true, 
it  need  not  trouble  us.  But  it  is  a  fact  that  ignorance  of 
Latin  and  Greek  and  mathematics  closes  certain  careers 
to  men  (I  do  not  mean  artificial,  unnecessary,  noxious 
careers  like  those  of  the  commercial  schoolmaster).  Lan- 
guages, even  dead  ones,  have  their  uses;  and,  as  it  seems 
to  many  of  us,  mathematics  have  their  uses.  They  will 
always  be  learned  by  people  who  want  to  learn  them; 
and  people  will  always  want  to  learn  them  as  long  as  they 
are  of  any  importance  in  life:  indeed  the  want  will  survive 
their  importance:  superstition  is  nowhere  stronger  than 
in  the  field  of  obsolete  acquirements.  And  they  will  never 
be  learnt  fruitfully  by  people  who  do  not  want  to  learn 
them  either  for  their  own  sake  or  for  use  in  necessary  work. 
There  is  no  harder  schoolmaster  than  experience;  and 
yet  experience  fails'  to  teach  where  there  is  no  desire  to 
learn. 

Still,  one  must  not  begin  to  apply  this  generalization 
too  early.  And  this  brings  me  to  an  important  factor  in 
the  case:  the  factor  of  evolution. 

Docility  and  Dependence 

If  anyone,  impressed  by  my  view  that  the  rights  of  a 
child  are  precisely  those  of  an  adult,  proceeds  to  treat  a 
child  as  if  it  were  an  adult,  he  (or  she)  will  find  that  though 
the  plan  will  work  much  better  at  some  points  than  the 
usual  plan,  at  others  it  will  not  work  at  all;  and  this  dis- 
covery may  provoke  him  to  turn  back  from  the  whole 
conception  of  children's  rights  with  a  jest  at  the  expense 
of  bachelors'  and  old  maids'  children.  In  dealing  with 
children  what  is  needed  is  not  logic  but  sense.  There  is 
no  logical  reason  why  young  persons  should  be  allowed 


Parents  and  Children  lxxi 

greater  control  of  their  property  the  day  after  they  are 
twenty-one  than  the  day  before  it.  There  is  no  logical 
reason  why  I,  who  strongly  object  to  an  adult  standing 
over  a  boy  of  ten  with  a  Latin  grammar,  and  saying, 
"you  must  learn  this,  whether  you  want  to  or  not," 
should  nevertheless  be  quite  prepared  to  stand  over  a 
boy  of  five  with  the  multiplication  table  or  a  copy  book 
or  a  code  of  elementary  good  manners,  and  practice  on 
his  docility  to  make  him  learn  them.  And  there  is  no  log- 
ical reason  why  I  should  do  for  a  child  a  great  many  little 
offices,  some  of  them  troublesome  and  disagreeable,  which 
I  should  not  do  for  a  boy  twice  its  age,  or  support  a  boy 
or  girl  when  I  would  unhesitatingly  throw  an  adult  on 
his  own  resources.  But  there  are  practical  reasons,  and 
sensible  reasons,  and  affectionate  reasons  for  all  these 
illogicalities.  Children  do  not  want  to  be  treated  alto- 
gether as  adults:  such  treatment  terrifies  them  and  over- 
burdens them  with  responsibility.  In  truth,  very  few 
adults  care  to  be  called  on  for  independence  and  origi- 
nality: they  also  are  bewildered  and  terrified  in  the  absence 
of  precedents  and  precepts  and  commandments;  but 
modern  Democracy  allows  them  a  sanctioning  and  can- 
celling power  if  they  are  capable  of  using  it,  which  chil- 
dren are  not.  To  treat  a  child  wholly  as  an  adult  would 
be  to  mock  and  destroy  it.  Infantile  docility  and  juvenile 
dependence  are,  like  death,  a  product  of  Natural  Selection; 
and  though  there  is  no  viler  crime  than  to  abuse  them, 
yet  there  is  no  greater  cruelty  than  to  ignore  them.  I 
have  complained  sufficiently  of  what  I  suffered  through 
the  process  of  assault,  imprisonment,  and  compulsory  les- 
sons that  taught  me  nothing,  which  are  called  my  school- 
ing. But  I  could  say  a  good  deal  also  about  the  things 
I  was  not  taught  and  should  have  been  taught,  not  to 
mention  the  things  I  was  allowed  to  do  which  I  should 
not  have  been  allowed  to  do.  I  have  no  recollection  of 
being  taught  to  read  or  write;  so  I  presume  I  was  born  with 


lxxii  Parents  and  Children 

both  faculties;  but  many  people  seem  to  have  bitter  recol- 
lections of  being  forced  reluctantly  to  acquire  them.  And 
though  I  have  the  uttermost  contempt  for  a  teacher  so 
ill  mannered  and  incompetent  as  to  be  unable  to  make  a 
child  learn  to  read  and  write  without  also  making  it  cry, 
still  I  am  prepared  to  admit  that  I  had  rather  have  been 
compelled  to  learn  to  read  and  write  with  tears  by  an 
incompetent  and  ill  mannered  person  than  left  in  igno- 
rance. Reading,  writing,  and  enough  arithmetic  to  use 
money  honestly  and  accurately,  together  with  the  rudi- 
ments of  law  and  order,  become  necessary  conditions  of  a 
child's  liberty  before  it  can  appreciate  the  importance  of 
its  liberty,  or  foresee  that  these  accomplishments  are 
worth  acquiring.  Nature  has  provided  for  this  by  evolv- 
ing the  instinct  of  docility.  Children  are  very  docile: 
they  have  a  sound  intuition  that  they  must  do  what  they 
are  told  or  perish.  And  adults  have  an  intuition,  equally 
sound,  that  they  must  take  advantage  of  this  docility  to 
teach  children  how  to  live  properly  or  the  children  will 
not  survive.  The  difficulty  is  to  know  where  to  stop.  To 
illustrate  this,  let  us  consider  the  main  danger  of  childish 
docility  and  parental  officiousness. 

The  Abuse  of  Docility 

Docility  may  survive  as  a  lazy  habit  long  after  it  has 
ceased  to  be  a  beneficial  instinct.  If  you  catch  a  child 
when  it  is  young  enough  to  be  instinctively  docile,  and 
keep  it  in  a  condition  of  unremitted  tutelage  under  the 
nurserymaid,  the  governess,  the  preparatory  school,  the 
secondary  school,  and  the  university,  until  it  is  an  adult, 
you  will  produce,  not  a  self-reliant,  free,  fully  matured 
human  being,  but  a  grown-up  schoolboy  or  schoolgirl, 
capable  of  nothing  in  the  way  of  original  or  independent 
action  except  outbursts  of  naughtiness  in  the  women  and 
blackguardism  in  the  men.     That  is  exactly  what  we  get 


Parents  and  Children  lxxiii 

at  present  in  our  rich  and  consequently  governing  classes: 
they  pass  from  juvenility  to  senility  without  ever  touching 
maturity  except  in  body.  The  classes  which  cannot  afford 
this  sustained  tutelage  are  notably  more  self-reliant  and 
grown-up:  an  office  boy  of  fifteen  is  often  more  of  a  man 
than  a  university  student  of  twenty.  Unfortunately  this 
.precocity  is  disabled  by  poverty,  ignorance,  narrowness, 
and  a  hideous  power  of  living  without  art  or  love  or  beauty 
and  being  rather  proud  of  it.  The  poor  never  escape  from 
servitude:  their  docility  is  preserved  by  their  slavery. 
And  so  all  become  the  prey  of  the  greedy,  the  selfish,  the 
domineering,  the  unscrupulous,  the  predatory.  If  here 
and  there  an  individual  refuses  to  be  docile,  ten  docile 
persons  will  beat  him  or  lock  him  up  or  shoot  him  or  hang 
him  at  the  bidding  of  his  oppressors  and  their  own.  The 
crux  of  the  whole  difficulty  about  parents,  schoolmasters, 
priests,  absolute  monarchs,  and  despots  of  every  sort,  is 
the  tendency  to  abuse  natural  docility.  A  nation  should 
always  be  healthily  rebellious;  but  the  king  or  prime  min- 
ister has  yet  to  be  found  who  will  make  trouble  by  culti- 
vating that  side  of  the  national  spirit.  A  child  should 
begin  to  assert  itself  early,  and  shift  for  itself  more  and 
more  not  only  in  washing  and  dressing  itself,  but  in  opin- 
ions and  conduct;  yet  as  nothing  is  so  exasperating  and 
so  unlovable  as  an  uppish  child,  it  is  useless  to  expect  par- 
ents and  schoolmasters  to  inculcate  this  uppishness.  Such 
unamiable  precepts  as  Always  contradict  an  authoritative 
statement,  Always  return  a  blow,  Never  lose  a  chance  of 
a  good  fight,  When  you  are  scolded  for  a  mistake  ask  the 
person  who  scolds  you  whether  he  or  she  supposes  you 
did  it  on  purpose,  and  follow  the  question  with  a  blow 
or  an  insult  or  some  other  unmistakable  expression  of 
resentment,  Remember  that  the  progress  of  the  world 
depends  on  your  knowing  better  than  your  elders,  are 
just  as  important  as  those  of  The  Sermon  on  the  Mount; 
but  no  one  has  yet  seen  them  written  up  in  letters  of  gold 


lxxiv  Parents  and  Children 

in  a  schoolroom  or  nursery.  The  child  is  taught  to  be 
kind,  to  be  respectful,  to  be  quiet,  not  to  answer  back,  to 
be  truthful  when  its  elders  want  to  find  out  anything  from 
it,  to  lie  when  the  truth  would  shock  or  hurt  its  elders,  to 
be  above  all  things  obedient,  and  to  be  seen  and  not  heard. 
Here  we  have  two  sets  of  precepts,  each  warranted  to  spoil 
a  child  hopelessly  if  the  other  be  omitted.  Unfortunately 
we  do  not  allow  fair  play  between  them.  The  rebellious, 
intractable,  aggressive,  selfish  set  provoke  a  corrective 
resistance,  and  do  not  pretend  to  high  moral  or  religious 
sanctions;  and  they  are  never  urged  by  grown-up  people 
on  young  people.  They  are  therefore  more  in  danger  of 
neglect  or  suppression  than  the  other  set,  which  have  all 
the  adults,  all  the  laws,  all  the  religions  on  their  side. 
How  is  the  child  to  be  secured  its  due  share  of  both  bodies 
of  doctrine? 

The  Schoolboy  and  the  Homeboy 

In  practice  what  happens  is  that  parents  notice  that 
boys  brought  up  at  home  become  mollycoddles,  or  prigs, 
or  duffers,  unable  to  take  care  of  themselves.  They  see 
that  boys  should  learn  to  rough  it  a  little  and  to  mix 
with  children  of  their  own  age.  This  is  natural  enough. 
When  you  have  preached  at  and  punished  a  boy  until  he 
is  a  moral  cripple,  you  are  as  much  hampered  by  him  as 
by  a  physical  cripple;  and  as  you  do  not  intend  to  have 
him  on  your  hands  all  your  life,  and  are  generally  rather 
impatient  for  the  day  when  he  will  earn  his  own  living 
and  leave  you  to  attend  to  yourself,  you  sooner  or  later 
begin  to  talk  to  him  about  the  need  for  self-reliance,  learn- 
ing to  think,  and  so  forth,  with  the  result  that  your  vic- 
tim, bewildered  by  your  inconsistency,  concludes  that 
there  is  no  use  trying  to  please  you,  and  falls  into  an 
attitude  of  sulky  resentment.  Which  is  an  additional 
inducement  to  pack  him  off  to  school. 


Parents  and  Children  Ixxv 

In  school,  he  finds  himself  in  a  dual  world,  under  two 
dispensations.  There  is  the  world  of  the  boys,  where  the 
point  of  honor  is  to  be  untameable,  always  ready  to  fight, 
ruthless  in  taking  the  conceit  out  of  anyone  who  ventures 
to  give  himself  airs  of  superior  knowledge  or  taste,  and 
generally  to  take  Lucifer  for  one's  model.  And  there  is 
the  world  of  the  masters,  the  world  of  discipline,  submis- 
sion, diligence,  obedience,  and  continual  and  shameless 
assumption  of  moral  and  intellectual  authority.  Thus 
the  schoolboy  hears  both  sides,  and  is  so  far  better  off 
than  the  homebred  boy  who  hears  only  one.  But  the 
two  sides  are  not  fairly  presented.  They  are  presented  as 
good  and  evil,  as  vice  and  virtue,  as  villainy  and  heroism. 
The  boy  feels  mean  and  cowardly  when  he  obeys,  and  self- 
ish and  rascally  when  he  disobeys.  He  looses  his  moral 
courage  just  as  he  comes  to  hate  books  and  languages. 
In  the  end,  John  Ruskin,  tied  so  close  to  his  mother's 
apron-string  that  he  did  not  escape  even  when  he  went  to 
Oxford,  and  John  Stuart  Mill,  whose  father  ought  to  have 
been  prosecuted  for  laying  his  son's  childhood  waste  with 
lessons,  were  superior,  as  products  of  training,  to  our 
schoolboys.  They  were  very  conspicuously  superior  in 
moral  courage;  and  though  they  did  not  distinguish  them- 
selves at  cricket  and  football,  they  had  quite  as  much 
physical  hardihood  as  any  civilized  man  needs.  But  it  is 
to  be  observed  that  Ruskin's  parents  were  wise  people 
who  gave  John  a  full  share  in  their  own  life,  and  put  up 
with  his  presence  both  at  home  and  abroad  when  they 
must  sometimes  have  been  very  weary  of  him;  and  Mill, 
as  it  happens,  was  deliberately  educated  to  challenge  all 
the  most  sacred  institutions  of  his  country.  The  house- 
holds they  were  brought  up  in  were  no  more  average 
households  than  a  Montessori  school  is  an  average  school. 


lxxvi  Parents  and  Children 

The  Comings  of  Age  of  Children 

All  this  inculcated  adult  docility,  which  wrecks  every 
civilization  as  it  is  wrecking  ours,  is  inhuman  and  un- 
natural. We  must  reconsider  our  institution  of  the  Com- 
ing of  Age,  which  is  too  late  for  some  purposes,  and  too 
early  for  others.  There  should  be  a  series  of  Coming  of 
Ages  for  every  individual.  The  mammals  have  their  first 
coming  of  age  when  they  are  weaned;  and  it  is  noteworthy 
that  this  rather  cruel  and  selfish  operation  on  the  part  of 
the  parent  has  to  be  performed  resolutely,  with  claws  and 
teeth;  for  your  little  mammal  does  not  want  to  be  weaned, 
and  yields  only  to  a  pretty  rough  assertion  of  the  right 
of  the  parent  to  be  relieved  of  the  child  as  soon  as  the 
child  is  old  enough  to  bear  the  separation.  The  same 
thing  occurs  with  children:  they  hang  on  to  the  mother's 
apron-string  and  the  father's  coat  tails  as  long  as  they 
can,  often  baffling  those  sensitive  parents  who  know  that 
children  should  think  for  themselves  and  fend  for  them- 
selves, but  are  too  kind  to  throw  them  on  their  own  re- 
sources with  the  ferocity  of  the  domestic  cat.  The  child 
should  have  its  first  coming  of  age  when  it  is  weaned, 
another  when  it  can  talk,  another  when  it  can  walk, 
another  when  it  can  dress  itself  without  assistance;  and 
when  it  can  read,  write,  count  money,  and  pass  an  ex- 
amination in  going  a  simple  errand  involving  a  purchase 
and  a  journey  by  rail  or  other  public  method  of  locomotion, 
it  should  have  quite  a  majority.  At  present  the  children 
of  laborers  are  soon  mobile  and  able  to  shift  for  them- 
selves, whereas  it  is  possible  to  find  grown-up  women  in 
the  rich  classes  who  are  actually  afraid  to  take  a  walk  in 
the  streets  unattended  and  unprotected.  It  is  true  that 
this  is  a  superstition  from  the  time  when  a  retinue  was 
part  of  the  state  of  persons  of  quality,  and  the  unattended 
person  was  supposed  to  be  a  common  person  of  no  quality, 
earning  a  living;  but  this  has  now  become  so  absurd  that 


Parents  and  Children  lxxvii 

children  and  young  women  are  no  longer  told  why  they 
are  forbidden  to  go  about  alone,  and  have  to  be  persuaded 
that  the  streets  are  dangerous  places,  which  of  course 
they  are;  but  people  who  are  not  educated  to  live  danger- 
ously have  only  half  a  life,  and  are  more  likely  to  die  mis- 
erably after  all  than  those  who  have  taken  all  the  common 
risks  of  freedom  from  their  childhood  onward  as  matters 
of  course. 

The  Conflict  of  Wills 

The  world  wags  in  spite  of  its  schools  and  its  families 
because  both  schools  and  families  are  mostly  very  largely 
anarchic:  parents  and  schoolmasters  are  good-natured  or 
weak  or  lazy;  and  children  are  docile  and  affectionate  and 
very  shortwinded  in  their  fits  of  naughtiness;  and  so  most 
families  slummock  along  and  muddle  through  until  the 
children  cease  to  be  children.  In  the  few  cases  when  the 
parties  are  energetic  and  determined,  the  child  is  crushed 
or  the  parent  is  reduced  to  a  cipher,  as  the  case  may  be. 
When  the  opposed  forces  are  neither  of  them  strong  enough 
to  annihilate  the  other,  there  is  serious  trouble:  that  is 
how  we  get  those  feuds  between  parent  and  child  which 
recur  to  our  memory  so  ironically  when  we  hear  people 
sentimentalizing  about  natural  affection.  We  even  get 
tragedies;  for  there  is  nothing  so  tragic  to  contemplate  or 
so  devastating  to  suffer  as  the  oppression  of  will  without 
conscience;  and  the  whole  tendency  of  our  family  and 
school  system  is  to  set  the  will  of  the  parent  and  the  school 
despot  above  conscience  as  something  that  must  be  de- 
ferred to  abjectly  and  absolutely  for  its  own  sake. 

The  strongest,  fiercest  force  in  nature  is  human  will. 
It  is  the  highest  organization  we  know  of  the  will  that  has 
created  the  whole  universe.  Now  all  honest  civilization, 
religion,  law,  and  convention  is  an  attempt  to  keep  this 
force  within  beneficent  bounds.  What  corrupts  civiliza- 
tion, religion,  law,  and  convention  (and  they  are  at  pres- 


lxxviii  Parents  and  Children 

ent  pretty  nearly  as  corrupt  as  they  dare)  is  the  constant 
attempts  made  by  the  wills  of  individuals  and  classes  to 
thwart  the  wills  and  enslave  the  powers  of  other  individuals 
and  classes.  The  powers  of  the  parent  and  the  school- 
master, and  of  their  public  analogues  the  lawgiver  and 
the  judge,  become  instruments  of  tyranny  in  the  hands 
of  those  who  are  too  narrow-minded  to  understand  law  and 
exercise  judgment;  and  in  their  hands  (with  us  they  mostly 
fall  into  such  hands)  law  becomes  tyranny.  And  what  is 
a  tyrant?  Quite  simply  a  person  who  says  to  another 
person,  young  or  old,  "You  shall  do  as  I  tell  you;  you  shall 
make  what  I  want;  you  shall  profess  my  creed;  you  shall 
have  no  will  of  your  own;  and  your  powers  shall  be  at  the 
disposal  of  my  will."  It  has  come  to  this  at  last:  that  the 
phrase  "she  has  a  will  of  her  own,"  or  "he  has  a  will  of 
his  own"  has  come  to  denote  a  person  of  exceptional 
obstinacy  and  self-assertion.  And  even  persons  of  good 
natural  disposition,  if  brought  up  to  expect  such  defer- 
ence, are  roused  to  unreasoning  fury,  and  sometimes  to 
the  commission  of  atrocious  crimes,  by  the  slightest  chal- 
lenge to  their  authority.  Thus  a  laborer  may  be  dirty, 
drunken,  untruthful,  slothful,  untrustworthy  in  every 
way  without  exhausting  the  indulgence  of  the  country 
house.  But  let  him  dare  to  be  "disrespectful"  and  he  is 
a  lost  man,  though  he  be  the  cleanest,  soberest,  most 
diligent,  most  veracious,  most  trustworthy  man  in  the 
county.  Dickens's  instinct  for  detecting  social  cankers 
never  served  him  better  than  when  he  shewed  us  Mrs  Heep 
teaching  her  son  to  "be  umble,"  knowing  that  if  he  carried 
out  that  precept  he  might  be  pretty  well  anything  else 
he  liked.  The  maintenance  of  deference  to  our  wills  be- 
comes a  mania  which  will  carry  the  best  of  us  to  any  ex- 
tremity. We  will  allow  a  village  of  Egyptian  fellaheen  or 
Indian  tribesmen  to  live  the  lowest  life  they  please  among 
themselves  without  molestation;  but  let  one  of  them  slay 
an  Englishman  or  even  strike  him  on  the  strongest  provo- 


Parents  and  Children  lxxix 

cation,  and  straightway  we  go  stark  mad,  burning  and 
destroying,  shooting  and  shelling,  flogging  and  hanging, 
if  only  such  survivors  as  we  may  leave  are  thoroughly 
cowed  in  the  presence  of  a  man  with  a  white  face.  In 
the  committee  room  of  a  local  council  or  city  corporation, 
the  humblest  employees  of  the  committee  find  defenders 
if  they  complain  of  harsh  treatment.  Gratuities  are  voted, 
indulgences  and  holidays  are  pleaded  for,  delinquencies  are 
excused  in  the  most  sentimental  manner  provided  only 
the  employee,  however  patent  a  hypocrite  or  incorrigible 
a  slacker,  is  hat  in  hand.  But  let  the  most  obvious  measure 
of  justice  be  demanded  by  the  secretary  of  a  Trade  Union 
in  terms  which  omit  all  expressions  of  subservience,  and 
it  is  with  the  greatest  difficulty  that  the  cooler-headed 
can  defeat  angry  motions  that  the  letter  be  thrown  into 
the  waste  paper  basket  and  the  committee  proceed  to 
the  next  business. 

The  Demagogue's  Opportunity 

And  the  employee  has  in  him  the  same  fierce  impulse 
to  impose  his  will  without  respect  for  the  will  of  others. 
Democracy  is  in  practice  nothing  but  a  device  for  cajoling 
from  him  the  vote  he  refuses  to  arbitrary  authority.  He 
will  not  vote  for  Coriolanus;  but  when  an  experienced 
demagogue  comes  along  and  says,  "Sir:  you  are  the  dic- 
tator: the  voice  of  the  people  is  the  voice  of  God;  and  I 
am  only  your  very  humble  servant,"  he  says  at  once, 
"All  right:  tell  me  what  to  dictate,"  and  is  presently  en- 
slaved more  effectually  with  his  own  silly  consent  than 
Coriolanus  would  ever  have  enslaved  him  without  asking 
his  leave.  And  the  trick  by  which  the  demagogue  defeats 
Coriolanus  is  played  on  him  in  his  turn  by  his  inferiors. 
Everywhere  we  see  the  cunning  succeeding  in  the  world 
by  seeking  a  rich  or  powerful  master  and  practising  on  his 
lust  for  subservience.     The  political  adventurer  who  gets 


lxxx  Parents  and  Children 

into  parliament  by  offering  himself  to  the  poor  voter, 
not  as  his  representative  but  as  his  will-less  soulless  "del- 
egate," is  himself  the  dupe  of  a  clever  wife  who  repudiates 
Votes  for  Women,  knowing  well  that  whilst  the  man  is 
master,  the  man's  mistress  will  rule.  Uriah  Heep  may 
be  a  crawling  creature;  but  his  crawling  takes  him  upstairs. 

Thus  does  the  selfishness  of  the  will  turn  on  itself,  and 
obtain  by  flattery  what  it  cannot  seize  by  open  force. 
Democracy  becomes  the  latest  trick  of  tyranny:  "woman- 
liness" becomes  the  latest  wile  of  prostitution. 

Between  parent  and  child  the  same  conflict  wages  and 
the  same  destruction  of  character  ensues.  Parents  set 
themselves  to  bend  the  will  of  their  children  to  their  own 
— to  break  their  stubborn  spirit,  as  they  call  it — with  the 
ruthlessness  of  Grand  Inquisitors.  Cunning,  unscrupu- 
lous children  learn  all  the  arts  of  the  sneak  in  circumventing 
tyranny :  children  of  better  character  are  cruelly  distressed 
and  more  or  less  lamed  for  life  by  it. 

Our  Quarrelsomeness 

As  between  adults,  we  find  a  general  quarrelsomeness 
which  makes  political  reform  as  impossible  to  most  Eng- 
lishmen as  to  hogs.  Certain  sections  of  the  nation  get 
cured  of  this  disability.  University  men,  sailors,  and  pol- 
iticians are  comparatively  free  from  it,  because  the  com- 
munal life  of  the  University,  the  fact  that  in  a  ship  a  man 
must  either  learn  to  consider  others  or  else  go  overboard 
or  into  irons,  and  the  habit  of  working  on  committees 
and  ceasing  to  expect  more  of  one's  own  way  than  is  in- 
cluded in  the  greatest  common  measure  of  the  committee, 
educate  the  will  socially.  But  no  one  who  has  ever  had 
to  guide  a  committee  of  ordinary  private  Englishmen 
through  their  first  attempts  at  collective  action,  in  com- 
mittee or  otherwise,  can  retain  any  illusions  as  to  the  ap- 
palling effects  on  our  national  manners  and  character  of 


Parents  and  Children  lxxxi 

the  organization  of  the  home  and  the  school  as  petty  tyr- 
annies, and  the  absence  of  all  teaching  of  self-respect  and 
training  in  self-assertion.  Bullied  and  ordered  about,  the 
Englishman  obeys  like  a  sheep,  evades  like  a  knave,  or 
tries  to  murder  his  oppressor.  Merely  criticized  or  opposed 
in  committee,  or  invited  to  consider  anybody's  views  but 
his  own,  he  feels  personally  insulted  and  wants  to  resign 
or  leave  the  room  unless  he  is  apologized  to.  And  his 
panic  and  bewilderment  when  he  sees  that  the  older  hands 
at  the  work  have  no  patience  with  him  and  do  not  intend 
to  treat  him  as  infallible,  are  pitiable  as  far  as  they  are 
anything  but  ludicrous.  That  is  what  comes  of  not  being 
taught  to  consider  other  people's  wills,  and  left  to  submit 
to  them  or  to  over-ride  them  as  if  they  were  the  winds  and 
the  weather.  Such  a  state  of  mind  is  incompatible  not 
only  with  the  democratic  introduction  of  high  civilization, 
but  with  the  comprehension  and  maintenance  of  such 
civilized  institutions  as  have  been  introduced  by  benevo- 
lent and  intelligent  despots  and  aristocrats. 


We    Must    Reform    Society    before    we    can 
Reform  Ourselves 

When  we  come  to  the  positive  problem  of  what  to  do 
with  children  if  we  are  to  give  up  the  established  plan, 
we  find  the  difficulties  so  great  that  we  begin  to  under- 
stand why  so  many  people  who  detest  the  system  and 
look  back  with  loathing  on  their  own  schooldays,  must 
helplessly  send  their  children  to  the  very  schools  they 
themselves  were  sent  to,  because  there  is  no  alternative 
except  abandoning  the  children  to  undisciplined  vaga- 
bondism. Man  in  society  must  do  as  everybody  else  does 
in  his  class:  only  fools  and  romantic  novices  imagine  that 
freedom  is  a  mere  matter  of  the  readiness  of  the  individual 
to  snap  his  fingers  at  convention.     It  is  true  that  most 


lxxxii  Parents  and  Children 

of  us  live  in  a  condition  of  quite  unnecessary  inhibition, 
wearing  ugly  and  uncomfortable  clothes,  making  ourselves 
and  other  people  miserable  by  the  heathen  horrors  of 
mourning,  staying  away  from  the  theatre  because  we 
cannot  afford  the  stalls  and  are  ashamed  to  go  to  the 
pit,  and  in  dozens  of  other  ways  enslaving  ourselves  when 
there  are  comfortable  alternatives  open  to  us  without 
any  real  drawbacks.  The  contemplation  of  these  petty 
slaveries,  and  of  the  triumphant  ease  with  which  sensible 
people  throw  them  off,  creates  an  impression  that  if  we 
only  take  Johnson's  advice  to  free  our  minds  from  cant, 
we  can  achieve  freedom.  But  if  we  all  freed  our  minds 
from  cant  we  should  find  that  for  the  most  part  we  should 
have  to  go  on  doing  the  necessary  work  of  the  world  ex- 
actly as  we  did  it  before  until  we  organized  new  and  free 
methods  of  doing  it.  Many  people  believed  in  secondary 
co-education  (boys  and  girls  taught  together)  before 
schools  like  Bedales  were  founded:  indeed  the  practice 
was  common  enough  in  elementary  schools  and  in  Scot- 
land; but  their  belief  did  not  help  them  until  Bedales  and 
St  George's  were  organized;  and  there  are  still  not  nearly 
enough  co-educational  schools  in  existence  to  accommo- 
date all  the  children  of  the  parents  who  believe  in  co-edu- 
cation up  to  university  age,  even  if  they  could  always 
afford  the  fees  of  these  exceptional  schools.  It  may  be 
edifying  to  tell  a  duke  that  our  public  schools  are  all  wrong 
in  their  constitution  and  methods,  or  a  costermonger  that 
children  should  be  treated  as  in  Goethe's  Wilhelm  Meister 
instead  of  as  they  are  treated  at  the  elementary  school  at 
the  corner  of  his  street;  but  what  are  the  duke  and  the 
coster  to  do?  Neither  of  them  has  any  effective  choice 
in  the  matter:  their  children  must  either  go  to  the  schools 
that  are,  or  to  no  school  at  all.  And  as  the  duke  thinks 
with  reason  that  his  son  will  be  a  lout  or  a  milksop  or  a 
prig  if  he  does  not  go  to  school,  and  the  coster  knows  that 
his  son  will  become  an  illiterate  hooligan  if  he  is  left  to 


Parents  and  Children  lxxxiii 

the  streets,  there  is  no  real  alternative  for  either  of  them. 
Child  life  must  be  socially  organized:  no  parent,  rich  or 
poor,  can  choose  institutions  that  do  not  exist;  and  the 
private  enterprise  of  individual  schoolmasters  appealing 
to  a  group  of  well-to-do  parents,  though  it  may  shew  what 
can  be  done  by  enthusiasts  with  new  methods,  cannot 
touch  the  mass  of  our  children.  For  the  average  parent 
or  child  nothing  is  really  available  except  the  established 
practice;  and  this  is  what  makes  it  so  important  that  the 
established  practice  should  be  a  sound  one,  and  so  useless 
for  clever  individuals  to  disparage  it  unless  they  can  organ- 
ize an  alternative  practice  and  make  it,  too,  general. 

The  Pursuit  of  Manners 

If  you  cross-examine  the  duke  and  the  coster,  you  will 
find  that  they  are  not  concerned  for  the  scholastic  attain- 
ments of  their  children.  Ask  the  duke  whether  he  could 
pass  the  standard  examination  of  twelve-year-old  children 
in  elementary  schools,  and  he  will  admit,  with  an  entirely 
placid  smile,  that  he  would  almost  certainly  be  ignomin- 
iously  plucked.  And  he  is  so  little  ashamed  of  or  dis- 
advantaged by  his  condition  that  he  is  not  prepared  to 
spend  an  hour  in  remedying  it.  The  coster  may  resent 
the  inquiry  instead  of  being  amused  by  it;  but  his  answer, 
if  true,  will  be  the  same.  What  they  both  want  for  their 
children  is  the  communal  training,  the  apprenticeship  to 
society,  the  lessons  in  holding  one's  own  among  people  of 
all  sorts  with  whom  one  is  not,  as  in  the  home,  on  privileged 
terms.  These  can  be  acquired  only  by  "mixing  with  the 
world,"  no  matter  how  wicked  the  world  is.  No  parent 
cares  twopence  whether  his  children  can  write  Latin 
hexameters  or  repeat  the  dates  of  the  accession  of  all  the 
English  monarchs  since  the  Conqueror;  but  all  parents 
are  earnestly  anxious  about  the  manners  of  their  children. 
Better  Claude  Duval  than  Kaspar  Hauser.    Laborers  who 


lxxxiv  Parents  and  Children 

are  contemptuously  anti-clerical  in  their  opinions  will  send 
their  daughters  to  the  convent  school  because  the  nuns 
teach  them  some  sort  of  gentleness  of  speech  and  behavior. 
And  peers  who  tell  you  that  our  public  schools  are  rotten 
through  and  through,  and  that  our  Universities  ought  to 
be  razed  to  the  foundations,  send  their  sons  to  Eton  and 
Oxford,  Harrow  and  Cambridge,  not  only  because  there 
is  nothing  else  to  be  done,  but  because  these  places,  though 
they  turn  out  blackguards  and  ignoramuses  and  boobies 
galore,  turn  them  out  with  the  habits  and  manners  of  the 
society  they  belong  to.  Bad  as  those  manners  are  in 
many  respects,  they  are  better  than  no  manners  at  all. 
And  no  individual  or  family  can  possibly  teach  them. 
They  can  be  acquired  only  by  living  in  an  organized  com- 
munity in  which  they  are  traditional. 

Thus  we  see  that  there  are  reasons  for  the  segregation 
of  children  even  in  families  where  the  great  reason: 
namely,  that  children  are  nuisances  to  adults,  does  not 
press  very  hardly,  as,  for  instance,  in  the  houses  of  the 
very  poor,  who  can  send  their  children  to  play  in  the 
streets,  or  the  houses  of  the  very  rich,  which  are  so  large 
that  the  children's  quarters  can  be  kept  out  of  the  parents' 
way  like  the  servants'  quarters. 

Not  too  much  Wind  on  the  Heath,  Brother 

What,  then,  is  to  be  done?  For  the  present,  unfortu- 
nately, little  except  propagating  the  conception  of  Chil- 
dren's Rights.  Only  the  achievement  of  economic  equality 
through  Socialism  can  make  it  possible  to  deal  thoroughly 
with  the  question  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  total 
interest  of  the  community,  which  must  always  consist 
of  grown-up  children.  Yet  economic  equality,  like  all 
simple  and  obvious  arrangements,  seems  impossible  to 
people  brought  up  as  children  are  now.  Still,  something 
can  be  done  even  within  class  limits.     Large  communities 


Parents  and  Children  Ixxxv 

of  children  of  the  same  class  are  possible  today;  and 
voluntary  organization  of  outdoor  life  for  children  has 
already  begun  in  Boy  Scouting  and  excursions  of  one 
kind  or  another.  The  discovery  that  anything,  even  school 
life,  is  better  for  the  child  than  home  life,  will  become  an 
over-ridden  hobby;  and  we  shall  presently  be  told  by  our 
faddists  that  anything,  even  camp  life,  is  better  than  school 
life.  Some  blundering  beginnings  of  this  are  already  per- 
ceptible. There  is  a  movement  for  making  our  British 
children  into  priggish  little  barefooted  vagabonds,  all 
talking  like  that  born  fool  George  Borrow,  and  supposed 
to  be  splendidly  healthy  because  they  would  die  if  they 
slept  in  rooms  with  the  windows  shut,  or  perhaps  even 
with  a  roof  over  their  heads.  Still,  this  is  a  fairly  healthy 
folly;  and  it  may  do  something  to  establish  Mr  Harold 
Cox's  claim  of  a  Right  to  Roam  as  the  basis  of  a  much 
needed  law  compelling  proprietors  of  land  to  provide 
plenty  of  gates  in  their  fences,  and  to  leave  them  unlocked 
when  there  are  no  growing  crops  to  be  damaged  nor  bulls 
to  be  encountered,  instead  of,  as  at  present,  imprisoning 
the  human  race  in  dusty  or  muddy  thoroughfares  between 
walls  of  barbed  wire. 

The  reaction  against  vagabondage  will  come  from  the 
children  themselves.  For  them  freedom  will  not  mean  the 
expensive  kind  of  savagery  now  called  "the  simple  life." 
Their  natural  disgust  with  the  visions  of  cockney  book 
fanciers  blowing  themselves  out  with  "the  wind  on  the 
heath,  brother,"  and  of  anarchists  who  are  either  too 
weak  to  understand  that  men  are  strong  and  free  in 
proportion  to  the  social  pressure  they  can  stand  and  the 
complexity  of  the  obligations  they  are  prepared  to  under- 
take, or  too  strong  to  realize  that  what  is  freedom  to  them 
may  be  terror  and  bewilderment  to  others,  will  drive  them 
back  to  the  home  and  the  school  if  these  have  meanwhile 
learned  the  lesson  that  children  are  independent  human 
beings  and  have  rights. 


lxxxvi  Parents  and  Children 

Wanted  :  a  Child's  Magna  Charta 

Whether  we  shall  presently  be  discussing  a  Juvenile 
Magna  Charta  or  Declaration  of  Rights  by  way  of  in- 
cluding children  in  the  Constitution  is  a  question  on  which 
I  leave  others  to  speculate.  But  if  it  could  once  be  estab- 
lished that  a  child  has  an  adult's  Right  of  Egress  from 
uncomfortable  places  and  unpleasant  company,  and  there 
were  children's  lawyers  to  sue  pedagogues  and  others  for 
assault  and  imprisonment,  there  would  be  an  amazing 
change  in  the  behavior  of  schoolmasters,  the  quality  of 
school  books,  and  the  amenities  of  school  life.  That 
Consciousness  of  Consent  which,  even  in  its  present  de- 
lusive form,  has  enabled  Democracy  to  oust  tyrannical 
systems  in  spite  of  all  its  vulgarities  and  stupidities  and 
rancors  and  ineptitudes  and  ignorances,  would  operate 
as  powerfully  among  children  as  it  does  now  among 
grown-ups.  No  doubt  the  pedagogue  would  promptly 
turn  demagogue,  and  woo  his  scholars  by  all  the  arts  of 
demagogy;  but  none  of  these  arts  can  easily  be  so  dis- 
honorable or  mischievous  as  the  art  of  caning.  And,  after 
all,  if  larger  liberties  are  attached  to  the  acquisition  of 
knowledge,  and  the  child  finds  that  it  can  no  more  go  to 
the  seaside  without  a  knowledge  of  the  multiplication  and 
pence  tables  than  it  can  be  an  astronomer  without  math- 
ematics, it  will  learn  the  multiplication  table,  which  is 
more  than  it  always  does  at  present,  in  spite  of  all  the  can- 
ings  and  keepings  in. 

The  Pursuit  of  Learning 

When  the  Pursuit  of  Learning  comes  to  mean  the 
pursuit  of  learning  by  the  child  instead  of  the  pursuit 
of  the  child  by  Learning,  cane  in  hand,  the  danger  will  be 
precocity  of  the  intellect,  which  is  just  as  undesirable  as 
precocity  of  the  emotions.     We  still  have  a  silly  habit 


Parents  and  Children  lxxxvii 

of  talking  and  thinking  as  if  intellect  were  a  mechanical 
process  and  not  a  passion;  and  in  spite  of  the  German 
tutors  who  confess  openly  that  three  out  of  every  five  of 
the  young  men  they  coach  for  examinations  are  lamed 
for  life  thereby;  in  spite  of  Dickens  and  his  picture  of 
little  Paul  Dombey  dying  of  lessons,  we  persist  in  heaping 
on  growing  children  and  adolescent  youths  and  maidens 
tasks  Pythagoras  would  have  declined  out  of  common 
regard  for  his  own  health  and  common  modesty  as  to  his 
own  capacity.  And  this  overwork  is  not  all  the  effect  of 
compulsion;  for  the  average  schoolmaster  does  not  compel 
his  scholars  to  learn:  he  only  scolds  and  punishes  them  if 
they  do  not,  which  is  quite  a  different  thing,  the  net  effect 
being  that  the  school  prisoners  need  not  learn  unless  they 
like.  Nay,  it  is  sometimes  remarked  that  the  school  dunce 
— meaning  the  one  who  does  not  like — often  turns  out 
well  afterwards,  as  if  idleness  were  a  sign  of  ability  and 
character.  A  much  more  sensible  explanation  is  that  the 
so-called  dunces  are  not  exhausted  before  they  begin  the 
serious  business  of  life.  It  is  said  that  boys  will  be  boys; 
and  one  can  only  add  one  wishes  they  would.  Boys  really 
want  to  be  manly,  and  are  unfortunately  encouraged 
thoughtlessly  in  this  very  dangerous  and  overstraining 
aspiration.  All  the  people  who  have  really  worked  (Her- 
bert Spencer  for  instance)  warn  us  against  work  as  earn- 
estly as  some  people  warn  us  against  drink.  When  learning 
is  placed  on  the  voluntary  footing  of  sport,  the  teacher 
will  find  himself  saying  every  day  "Run  away  and  play: 
you  have  worked  as  much  as  is  good  for  you."  Trying  to 
make  children  leave  school  will  be  like  trying  to  make 
them  go  to  bed;  and  it  will  be  necessary  to  surprise  them 
with  the  idea  that  teaching  is  work,  and  that  the  teacher 
is  tired  and  must  go  play  or  rest  or  eat:  possibilities 
always  concealed  by  that  infamous  humbug  the  current 
schoolmaster,  who  achieves  a  spurious  divinity  and  a 
witch  doctor's  authority  by  persuading  children  that  he 


lxxxviii         Parents  and  Children 

is  not  human,   just   as  ladies  persuade  them   that  they 
have  no  legs. 

Children  and  Game:  a  Proposal 

Of  the  many  wild  absurdities  of  our  existing  social 
order  perhaps  the  most  grotesque  is  the  costly  and  strictly 
enforced  reservation  of  large  tracts  of  country  as  deer 
forests  and  breeding  grounds  for  pheasants  whilst  there 
is  so  little  provision  of  the  kind  made  for  children.  I 
have  more  than  once  thought  of  trying  to  introduce  the 
shooting  of  children  as  a  sport,  as  the  children  would 
then  be  preserved  very  carefully  for  ten  months  in  the 
year,  thereby  reducing  their  death  rate  far  more  than  the 
fusillades  of  the  sportsmen  during  the  other  two  would 
raise  it.  At  present  the  killing  of  a  fox  except  by  a  pack 
of  foxhounds  is  regarded  with  horror;  but  you  may  and 
do  kill  children  in  a  hundred  and  fifty  ways  provided 
you  do  not  shoot  them  or  set  a  pack  of  dogs  on  them.  It 
must  be  admitted  that  the  foxes  have  the  best  of  it;  and 
indeed  a  glance  at  our  pheasants,  our  deer,  and  our  chil- 
dren will  convince  the  most  sceptical  that  the  children 
have  decidedly  the  worst  of  it. 

This  much  hope,  however,  can  be  extracted  from  the 
present  state  of  things.  It  is  so  fantastic,  so  mad,  so 
apparently  impossible,  that  no  scheme  of  reform  need 
ever  henceforth  be  discredited  on  the  ground  that  it  is 
fantastic  or  mad  or  apparently  impossible.  It  is  the  sen- 
sible schemes,  unfortunately,  that  are  hopeless  in  England. 
Therefore  I  have  great  hopes  that  my  own  views,  though 
fundamentally  sensible,  can  be  made  to  appear  fantastic 
enough  to  have  a  chance. 

First,  then,  I  lay  it  down  as  a  prime  condition  of  sane 
society,  obvious  as  such  to  anyone  but  an  idiot,  that  in 
any  decent  community,  children  should  find  in  every 
part  of  their  native  country,  food,  clothing,  lodging,  in- 


Parents  and  Children  lxxxix 

struction,  and  parental  kindness  for  the  asking.  For  the 
matter  of  that,  so  should  adults;  but  the  two  cases  differ 
in  that  as  these  commodities  do  not  grow  on  the  bushes, 
the  adults  cannot  have  them  unless  they  themselves 
organize  and  provide  the  supply,  whereas  the  children 
must  have  them  as  if  by  magic,  with  nothing  to  do  but 
rub  the  lamp,  like  Aladdin,  and  have  their  needs  satisfied. 

The  Parents'  Intolerable  Burden 

There  is  nothing  new  in  this:  it  is  how  children  have 
always  had  and  must  always  have  their  needs  satisfied. 
The  parent  has  to  play  the  part  of  Aladdin's  djinn;  and 
many  a  parent  has  sunk  beneath  the  burden  of  this  serv- 
ice. All  the  novelty  we  need  is  to  organize  it  so  that  in- 
stead of  the  individual  child  fastening  like  a  parasite  on 
its  own  particular  parents,  the  whole  body  of  children 
should  be  thrown  not  only  upon  the  whole  body  of  par- 
ents, but  upon  the  celibates  and  childless  as  well,  whose 
present  exemption  from  a  full  share  in  the  social  burden 
of  children  is  obviously  unjust  and  unwholesome.  Today 
it  is  easy  to  find  a  widow  who  has  at  great  cost  to  herself 
in  pain,  danger,  and  disablement,  borne  six  or  eight  chil- 
dren. In  the  same  town  you  will  find  rich  bachelors  and 
old  maids,  and  married  couples  with  no  children  or  with 
families  voluntarily  limited  to  two  or  three.  The  eight 
children  do  not  belong  to  the  woman  in  any  real  or  legal 
sense.  When  she  has  reared  them  they  pass  away  from 
her  into  the  community  as  independent  persons,  marrying 
strangers,  working  for  strangers,  spending  on  the  com- 
munity the  life  that  has  been  built  up  at  her  expense.  No 
more  monstrous  injustice  could  be  imagined  than  that 
the  burden  of  rearing  the  children  should  fall  on  her  alone 
and  not  on  the  celibates  and  the  selfish  as  well. 

This  is  so  far  recognized  that  already  the  child  finds, 
wherever  it  goes,  a  school  for  it,  and  somebody  to  force 


xc  Parents  and  Children 

it  into  the  school;  and  more  and  more  these  schools  are 
being  driven  by  the  mere  logic  of  facts  to  provide  the 
children  with  meals,  with  boots,  with  spectacles,  with 
dentists  and  doctors.  In  fact,  when  the  child's  parents 
are  destitute  or  not  to  be  found,  bread,  lodging,  and  cloth- 
ing are  provided.  It  is  true  that  they  are  provided  grudg- 
ingly and  on  conditions  infamous  enough  to  draw  down 
abundant  fire  from  Heaven  upon  us  every  day  in  the  shape 
of  crime  and  disease  and  vice;  but  still  the  practice  of 
keeping  children  barely  alive  at  the  charge  of  the  commun- 
ity is  established;  and  there  is  no  need  for  me  to  argue 
about  it.  I  propose  only  two  extensions  of  the  practice. 
One  is  to  provide  for  all  the  child's  reasonable  human 
wants,  on  which  point,  if  you  differ  from  me,  I  shall  take 
leave  to  say  that  you  are  socially  a  fool  and  personally 
an  inhuman  wretch.  The  other  is  that  these  wants  should 
be  supplied  in  complete  freedom  from  compulsory  school- 
ing or  compulsory  anything  except  restraint  from  crime, 
though,  as  they  can  be  supplied  only  by  social  organiza- 
tion, the  child  must  be  conscious  of  and  subject  to  the 
conditions  of  that  organization,  which  may  involve  such 
portions  of  adult  responsibility  and  duty  as  a  child  may 
be  able  to  bear  according  to  its  age,  and  which  will  in 
any  case  prevent  it  from  forming  the  vagabond  and  anar- 
chist habit  of  mind. 

One  more  exception  might  be  necessary:  compulsory 
freedom.  I  am  sure  that  a  child  should  not  be  impris- 
oned in  a  school.  I  am  not  so  sure  that  it  should  not 
sometimes  be  driven  out  into  the  open — imprisoned  in 
the  woods  and  on  the  mountains,  as  it  were.  For  there 
are  frowsty  children,  just  as  there  are  frowsty  adults, 
who  dont  want  freedom.  This  morbid  result  of  over- 
domestication  would,  let  us  hope,  soon  disappear  with  its 
cause. 


Parents  and  Children  xci 

Mobilization 

Those  who  see  no  prospect  held  out  to  them  by  this 
except  a  country  in  which  all  the  children  shall  be  roam- 
ing savages,  should  consider,  first,  whether  their  condition 
would  be  any  worse  than  that  of  the  little  caged  savages 
of  today,  and  second,  whether  either  children  or  adults 
are  so  apt  to  run  wild  that  it  is  necessary  to  tether  them 
fast  to  one  neighborhood  to  prevent  a  general  dissolution 
of  society.  My  own  observation  leads  me  to  believe  that 
we  are  not  half  mobilized  enough.  True,  I  cannot  deny 
that  we  are  more  mobile  than  we  were.  You  will  still 
find  in  the  home  counties  old  men  who  have  never  been 
to  London,  and  who  tell  you  that  they  once  went  to  Win- 
chester or  St  Albans  much  as  if  they  had  been  to  the  South 
Pole;  but  they  are  not  so  common  as  the  clerk  who  has 
been  to  Paris  or  to  Lovely  Lucerne,  and  who  "goes  away 
somewhere"  when  he  has  a  holiday.  His  grandfather 
never  had  a  holiday,  and,  if  he  had,  would  no  more  have 
dreamed  of  crossing  the  Channel  than  of  taking  a  box  at 
the  Opera.  But  with  all  allowance  for  the  Polytechnic 
excursion  and  the  tourist  agency,  our  inertia  is  still  ap- 
palling. I  confess  to  having  once  spent  nine  years  in 
London  without  putting  my  nose  outside  it;  and  though 
this  was  better,  perhaps,  than  the  restless  globe-trotting 
vagabondage  of  the  idle  rich,  wandering  from  hotel  to 
hotel  and  never  really  living  anywhere,  yet  I  should  no 
more  have  done  it  if  I  had  been  properly  mobilized  in  my 
childhood  than  I  should  have  worn  the  same  suit  of  clothes 
all  that  time  (which,  by  the  way,  I  very  nearly  did,  my 
professional  income  not  having  as  yet  begun  to  sprout). 
There  are  masses  of  people  who  could  afford  at  least  a 
trip  to  Margate,  and  a  good  many  who  could  afford  a 
trip  round  the  world,  who  are  more  immovable  than 
Aldgate  pump.  To  others,  who  would  move  if  they  knew 
how,  travelling  is  surrounded  with  imaginary  difficulties 


xcii  Parents  and  Children 

and  terrors.  In  short,  the  difficulty  is  not  to  fix  people, 
but  to  root  them  up.  We  keep  repeating  the  silly  proverb 
that  a  rolling  stone  gathers  no  moss,  as  if  moss  were  a 
desirable  parasite.  What  we  mean  is  that  a  vagabond  does 
not  prosper.  Even  this  is  not  true,  if  prosperity  means 
enjoyment  as  well  as  responsibility  and  money.  The  real 
misery  of  vagabondage  is  the  misery  of  having  nothing  to 
do  and  nowhere  to  go,  the  misery  of  being  derelict  of  God 
and  Man,  the  misery  of  the  idle,  poor  or  rich.  And  this 
is  one  of  the  miseries  of  unoccupied  childhood.  The  un- 
occupied adult,  thus  afflicted,  tries  many  distractions 
which  are,  to  say  the  least,  unsuited  to  children.  But 
one  of  them,  the  distraction  of  seeing  the  world,  is  inno- 
cent and  beneficial.  Also  it  is  childish,  being  a  continua- 
tion of  what  nurses  call  "taking  notice,"  by  which  a 
child  becomes  experienced.  It  is  pitiable  nowadays  to 
see  men  and  women  doing  after  the  age  of  45  all  the  trav- 
elling and  sightseeing  they  should  have  done  before  they 
were  15.  Mere  wondering  and  staring  at  things  is  an 
important  part  of  a  child's  education :  that  is  why  children 
can  be  thoroughly  mobilized  without  making  vagabonds 
of  them.  A  vagabond  is  at  home  nowhere  because  he 
wanders:  a  child  should  wander  because  it  ought  to  be  at 
home  everywhere.  And  if  it  has  its  papers  and  its  pass- 
ports, and  gets  what  it  requires  not  by  begging  and  pilfer- 
ing, but  from  responsible  agents  of  the  community  as  of 
right,  and  with  some  formal  acknowledgment  of  the  obli- 
gations it  is  incurring  and  a  knowledge  of  the  fact  that 
these  obligations  are  being  recorded:  if,  further,  certain 
qualifications  are  exacted  before  it  is  promoted  from  per- 
mission to  go  as  far  as  its  legs  will  carry  it  to  using  mechan- 
ical aids  to  locomotion,  it  can  roam  without  much  danger 
of  gypsification. 

Under  such  circumstances  the  boy  or  girl  could  always 
run  away,  and  never  be  lost;  and  on  no  other  conditions 
can  a  child  be  free  without  being  also  a  homeless  outcast. 


Parents  and  Children  xciii 

Parents  could  also  run  away  from  disagreeable  children  or 
drive  them  out  of  doors  or  even  drop  their  acquaintance, 
temporarily  or  permanently,  without  inhumanity.  Thus 
both  parties  would  be  on  their  good  behavior,  and  not,  as 
at  present,  on  their  filial  or  parental  behavior,  which, 
like  all  unfree  behavior,  is  mostly  bad  behavior. 

As  to  what  other  results  might  follow,  we  had  better 
wait  and  see;  for  nobody  now  alive  can  imagine  what 
customs  and  institutions  would  grow  up  in  societies  of 
free  children.  Child  laws  and  child  fashions,  child  man- 
ners and  child  morals  are  now  not  tolerated;  but  among 
free  children  there  would  certainly  be  surprising  develop- 
ments in  this  direction.  I  do  not  think  there  would  be 
any  danger  of  free  children  behaving  as  badly  as  grown-up 
people  do  now  because  they  have  never  been  free.  They 
could  hardly  behave  worse,  anyhow. 

Children's  Rights  and  Parents'  Wrongs 

A  very  distinguished  man  once  assured  a  mother  of  my 
acquaintance  that  she  would  never  know  what  it  meant 
to  be  hurt  until  she  was  hurt  through  her  children. 
Children  are  extremely  cruel  without  intending  it;  and  in 
ninety-nine  cases  out  of  a  hundred  the  reason  is  that  they 
do  not  conceive  their  elders  as  having  any  human  feelings. 
Serve  the  elders  right,  perhaps,  for  posing  as  superhuman! 
The  penalty  of  the  impostor  is  not  that  he  is  found  out 
(he  very  seldom  is)  but  that  he  is  taken  for  what  he  pre- 
tends to  be,  and  treated  as  such.  And  to  be  treated  as 
anything  but  what  you  really  are  may  seem  pleasant  to 
the  imagination  when  the  treatment  is  above  your  merits; 
but  in  actual  experience  it  is  often  quite  the  reverse.  When 
I  was  a  very  small  boy,  my  romantic  imagination,  stim- 
ulated by  early  doses  of  fiction,  led  me  to  brag  to  a  still 
smaller  boy  so  outrageously  that  he,  being  a  simple  soul, 
really  believed   me  to  be  an   invincible  hero.     I  cannot 


xciv  Parents  and  Children 

remember  whether  this  pleased  me  much;  but  I  do  re- 
member very  distinctly  that  one  day  this  admirer  of 
mine,  who  had  a  pet  goat,  found  the  animal  in  the  hands 
of  a  larger  boy  than  either  of  us,  who  mocked  him  and 
refused  to  restore  the  animal  to  his  rightful  owner. 
Whereupon,  naturally,  he  came  weeping  to  me,  and  de- 
manded that  I  should  rescue  the  goat  and  annihilate  the 
aggressor.  My  terror  was  beyond  description :  fortunately 
for  me,  it  imparted  such  a  ghastliness  to  my  voice  and 
aspect  as  I,  under  the  eye  of  my  poor  little  dupe,  advanced 
on  the  enemy  with  that  hideous  extremity  of  cowardice 
which  is  called  the  courage  of  despair,  and  said  "You  let 
go  that  goat,"  that  he  abandoned  his  prey  and  fled,  to 
my  unforgettable,  unspeakable  relief.  I  have  never  since 
exaggerated  my  prowess  in  bodily  combat. 

Now  what  happened  to  me  in  the  adventure  of  the 
goat  happens  very  often  to  parents,  and  would  happen 
to  schoolmasters  if  the  prison  door  of  the  school  did  not 
shut  out  the  trials  of  life.  I  remember  once,  at  school, 
the  resident  head  master  was  brought  down  to  earth  by 
the  sudden  illness  of  his  wife.  In  the  confusion  that  en- 
sued it  became  necessary  to  leave  one  of  the  schoolrooms 
without  a  master.  I  was  in  the  class  that  occupied  that 
schoolroom.  To  have  sent  us  home  would  have  been  to 
break  the  fundamental  bargain  with  our  parents  by  which 
the  school  was  bound  to  keep  us  out  of  their  way  for  half 
the  day  at  all  hazards.  Therefore  an  appeal  had  to  be 
made  to  our  better  feelings:  that  is,  to  our  common  hu- 
manity, not  to  make  a  noise.  But  the  head  master  had 
never  admitted  any  common  humanity  with  us.  We  had 
been  carefully  broken  in  to  regard  him  as  a  being  quite 
aloof  from  and  above  us:  one  not  subject  to  error  or  suf- 
fering or  death  or  illness  or  mortality.  Consequently 
sympathy  was  impossible;  and  if  the  unfortunate  lady 
did  not  perish,  it  was  because,  as  I  now  comfort  myself 
with  guessing,  she  was  too  much  pre-occupied  with  her 


Parents  and  Children  xcv 

own  pains,  and  possibly  making  too  much  noise  herself, 
to  be  conscious  of  the  pandemonium  downstairs. 

A  great  deal  of  the  fiendishness  of  schoolboys  and  the 
cruelty  of  children  to  their  elders  is  produced  just  in  this 
way.  Elders  cannot  be  superhuman  beings  and  suffering 
fellow-creatures  at  the  same  time.  If  you  pose  as  a  little 
god,  you  must  pose  for  better  for  worse. 

How  Little  We  Know  About  Our  Parents 

The  relation  between  parent  and  child  has  cruel  mo- 
ments for  the  parent  even  when  money  is  no  object,  and 
the  material  worries  are  delegated  to  servants  and  school 
teachers.  The  child  and  the  parent  are  strangers  to  one 
another  necessarily,  because  their  ages  must  differ  widely. 
Read  Goethe's  autobiography;  and  note  that  though  he 
was  happy  in  his  parents  and  had  exceptional  powers  of 
observation,  divination,  and  story-telling,  he  knew  less 
about  his  father  and  mother  than  about  most  of  the  other 
people  he  mentions.  I  myself  was  never  on  bad  terms 
with  my  mother:  we  lived  together  until  I  was  forty-two 
years  old,  absolutely  without  the  smallest  friction  of  any 
kind;  yet  when  her  death  set  me  thinking  curiously  about 
our  relations,  I  realized  that  I  knew  very  little  about 
her.  Introduce  me  to  a  strange  woman  who  was  a  child 
when  I  was  a  child,  a  girl  when  I  was  a  boy,  an  adolescent 
when  I  was  an  adolescent;  and  if  we  take  naturally  to  one 
another  I  will  know  more  of  her  and  she  of  me  at  the  end 
of  forty  days  (I  had  almost  said  of  forty  minutes)  than  I 
knew  of  my  mother  at  the  end  of  forty  years.  A  contem- 
porary stranger  is  a  novelty  and  an  enigma,  also  a  possi- 
bility; but  a  mother  is  like  a  broomstick  or  like  the  sun  in 
the  heavens,  it  does  not  matter  which  as  far  as  one's 
knowledge  of  her  is  concerned:  the  broomstick  is  there 
and  the  sun  is  there;  and  whether  the  child  is  beaten  by 
it  or  warmed  and  enlightened  by  it,  it  accepts  it  as  a  fact 


xcvi  Parents  and  Children 

in  nature,  and  does  not  conceive  it  as  having  had  youth, 
passions,  and  weaknesses,  or  as  still  growing,  yearning, 
suffering,  and  learning.  If  I  meet  a  widow  I  may  ask  her 
all  about  her  marriage;  but  what  son  ever  dreams  of  ask- 
ing his  mother  about  her  marriage,  or  could  endure  to 
hear  of  it  without  violently  breaking  off  the  old  sacred 
relationship  between  them,  and  ceasing  to  be  her  child 
or  anything  more  to  her  than  the  first  man  in  the  street 
might  be? 

Yet  though  in  this  sense  the  child  cannot  realize  its 
parent's  humanity,  the  parent  can  realize  the  child's;  for 
the  parents  with  their  experience  of  life  have  none  of  the 
illusions  about  the  child  that  the  child  has  about  the 
parents;  and  the  consequence  is  that  the  child  can  hurt 
its  parents'  feelings  much  more  than  its  parents  can  hurt 
the  child's,  because  the  child,  even  when  there  has  been 
none  of  the  deliberate  hypocrisy  by  which  children  are 
taken  advantage  of  by  their  elders,  cannot  conceive 
the  parent  as  a  fellow-creature,  whilst  the  parents  know 
very  well  that  the  children  are  only  themselves  over 
again.  The  child  cannot  conceive  that  its  blame  or  con- 
tempt or  want  of  interest  could  possibly  hurt  its  parent, 
and  therefore  expresses  them  all  with  an  indifference 
which  has  given  rise  to  the  term  enfant  terrible  (a  tragic 
term  in  spite  of  the  jests  connected  with  it) ;  whilst  the 
parent  can  suffer  from  such  slights  and  reproaches  more 
from  a  child  than  from  anyone  else,  even  when  the  child 
is  not  beloved,  because  the  child  is  so  unmistakably  sincere 
in  them. 

Our  Abandoned  Mothers 

Take  a  very  common  instance  of  this  agonizing  incom- 
patibility. A  widow  brings  up  her  son  to  manhood.  He 
meets  a  strange  woman,  and  goes  off  with  and  marries 
her,  leaving  his  mother  desolate.  It  does  not  occur  to  him 
that  this  is  at  all  hard  on  her:  he  does  it  as  a  matter  of 


Parents  and  Children  xcvii 

course,  and  actually  expects  his  mother  to  receive,  on 
terms  of  special  affection,  the  woman  for  whom  she  has 
been  abandoned.  If  he  shewed  any  sense  of  what  he  was 
doing,  any  remorse;  if  he  mingled  his  tears  with  hers  and 
asked  her  not  to  think  too  hardly  of  him  because  he  had 
obeyed  the  inevitable  destiny  of  a  man  to  leave  his  father 
and  mother  and  cleave  to  his  wife,  she  could  give  him  her 
blessing  and  accept  her  bereavement  with  dignity  and 
without  reproach.  But  the  man  never  dreams  of  such  con- 
siderations. To  him  his  mother's  feeling  in  the  matter, 
when  she  betrays  it,  is  unreasonable,  ridiculous,  and  even 
odious,  as  shewing  a  prejudice  against  his  adorable  bride. 
I  have  taken  the  widow  as  an  extreme  and  obvious  case ; 
but  there  are  many  husbands  and  wives  who  are  tired  of 
their  consorts,  or  disappointed  in  them,  or  estranged 
from  them  by  infidelities;  and  these  parents,  in  losing  a 
son  or  a  daughter  through  marriage,  may  be  losing  every- 
thing they  care  for.  No  parent's  love  is  as  innocent  as  the 
love  of  a  child :  the  exclusion  of  all  conscious  sexual  feeling 
from  it  does  not  exclude  the  bitterness,  jealousy,  and  de- 
spair at  loss  which  characterize  sexual  passion:  in  fact, 
what  is  called  a  pure  love  may  easily  be  more  selfish  and 
jealous  than  a  carnal  one.  Anyhow,  it  is  plain  matter  of 
fact  that  naively  selfish  people  sometimes  try  with  fierce 
jealousy  to  prevent  their  children  marrying. 

Family  Affection 

Until  the  family  as  we  know  it  ceases  to  exist,  nobody 
will  dare  to  analyze  parental  affection  as  distinguished 
from  that  general  human  sympathy  which  has  secured  to 
many  an  orphan  fonder  care  in  a  stranger's  house  than  it 
would  have  received  from  its  actual  parents.  Not  even 
Tolstoy,  in  The  Kreutzer  Sonata,  has  said  all  that  we 
suspect  about  it.  When  it  persists  beyond  the  period  at 
which  it  ceases  to  be  necessarv  to  the  child's  welfare,  it 


xcviii  Parents  and  Children 

is  apt  to  be  morbid;  and  we  are  probably  wrong  to  in- 
culcate its  deliberate  cultivation.  The  natural  course  is 
for  the  parents  and  children  to  cast  off  the  specific  parental 
and  filial  relation  when  they  are  no  longer  necessary  to 
one  another.  The  child  does  this  readily  enough  to  form 
fresh  ties,  closer  and  more  fascinating.  Parents  are  not 
always  excluded  from  such  compensations:  it  happens 
sometimes  that  when  the  children  go  out  at  the  door  the 
lover  comes  in  at  the  window.  Indeed  it  happens  now 
oftener  than  it  used  to,  because  people  remain  much 
longer  in  the  sexual  arena.  The  cultivated  Jewess  no 
longer  cuts  off  her  hair  at  her  marriage.  The  British 
matron  has  discarded  her  cap  and  her  conscientious  ugli- 
ness; and  a  bishop's  wife  at  fifty  has  more  of  the  air  of  a 
femme  galante  than  an  actress  had  at  thirty-five  in  her 
grandmother's  time.  But  as  people  marry  later,  the  facts 
of  age  and  time  still  inexorably  condemn  most  parents  to 
comparative  solitude  when  their  children  marry.  This  may 
be  a  privation  and  may  be  a  relief:  probably  in  healthy 
circumstances  it  is  no  worse  than  a  salutary  change  of 
habit;  but  even  at  that  it  is,  for  the  moment  at  least,  a 
wrench.  For  though  parents  and  children  sometimes  dis- 
like one  another,  there  is  an  experience  of  succor  and  a 
habit  of  dependence  and  expectation  formed  in  infancy 
which  naturally  attaches  a  child  to  its  parent  or  to  its 
nurse  (a  foster  parent)  in  a  quite  peculiar  waj\  A  benefit 
to  the  child  may  be  a  burden  to  the  parent;  but  people 
become  attached  to  their  burdens  sometimes  more  than 
the  burdens  are  attached  to  them;  and  to  "suffer  little 
children"  has  become  an  affectionate  impulse  deep  in  our 
nature. 

Now  there  is  no  such  impulse  to  suffer  our  sisters  and 
brothers,  our  aunts  and  uncles,  much  less  our  cousins.  If 
we  could  choose  our  relatives,  we  might,  by  selecting  con- 
genial ones,  mitigate  the  repulsive  effect  of  the  obligation 
to  like  them  and  to  admit  them  to  our  intimacy.     But  to 


Parents  and  Children  xcix 

have  a  person  imposed  on  us  as  a  brother  merely  because 
he  happens  to  have  the  same  parents  is  unbearable  when, 
as  may  easily  happen,  he  is  the  sort  of  person  we  should 
carefully  avoid  if  he  were  anyone  else's  brother.  All  Eu- 
rope (except  Scotland,  which  has  clans  instead  of  fam- 
ilies) draws  the  line  at  second  cousins.  Protestantism 
draws  it  still  closer  by  making  the  first  cousin  a  marriage- 
able stranger;  and  the  only  reason  for  not  drawing  it  at 
sisters  and  brothers  is  that  the  institution  of  the  family 
compels  us  to  spend  our  childhood  with  them,  and  thus 
imposes  on  us  a  curious  relation  in  which  familiarity  de- 
stroys romantic  charm,  and  is  yet  expected  to  create  a 
specially  warm  affection.  Such  a  relation  is  dangerously 
factitious  and  unnatural;  and  the  practical  moral  is  that 
the  less  said  at  home  about  specific  family  affection  the 
better.  Children,  like  grown-up  people,  get  on  well  enough 
together  if  they  are  not  pushed  down  one  another's  throats; 
and  grown-up  relatives  will  get  on  together  in  proportion 
to  their  separation  and  their  care  not  to  presume  on  their 
blood  relationship.  We  should  let  children's  feelings  take 
their  natural  course  without  prompting.  I  have  seen  a 
child  scolded  and  called  unfeeling  because  it  did  not  occur 
to  it  to  make  a  theatrical  demonstration  of  affectionate 
delight  when  its  mother  returned  after  an  absence:  a 
typical  example  of  the  way  in  which  spurious  family  sen- 
timent is  stoked  up.  We  are,  after  all,  sociable  animals; 
and  if  we  are  let  alone  in  the  matter  of  our  affections,  and 
well  brought  up  otherwise,  we  shall  not  get  on  any  the 
worse  with  particular  people  because  they  happen  to  be 
our  brothers  and  sisters  and  cousins.  The  danger  lies  in 
assuming  that  we  shall  get  on  any  better. 

The  main  point  to  grasp  here  is  that  families  are  not 
kept  together  at  present  by  family  feeling  but  by  human 
feeling.  The  family  cultivates  sympathy  and  mutual 
help  and  consolation  as  any  other  form  of  kindly  associa- 
tion cultivates  them;  but  the  addition  of  a  dictated  com- 


c  Parents  and  Children 

pulsory  affection  as  an  attribute  of  near  kinship  is  not 
only  unnecessary,  but  positively  detrimental;  and  the 
alleged  tendency  of  modern  social  development  to  break 
up  the  family  need  alarm  nobody.  We  cannot  break  up 
the  facts  of  kinship  nor  eradicate  its  natural  emotional 
consequences.  What  we  can  do  and  ought  to  do  is  to  set 
people  free  to  behave  naturally  and  to  change  their  be- 
havior as  circumstances  change.  To  impose  on  a  citizen 
of  London  the  family  duties  of  a  Highland  cateran  in  the 
eighteenth  century  is  as  absurd  as  to  compel  him  to  carry 
a  claymore  and  target  instead  of  an  umbrella.  The  civ- 
ilized man  has  no  special  use  for  cousins;  and  he  may  pres- 
ently find  that  he  has  no  special  use  for  brothers  and 
sisters.  The  parent  seems  likely  to  remain  indispensable; 
but  there  is  no  reason  why  that  natural  tie  should  be 
made  the  excuse  for  unnatural  aggravations  of  it,  as 
crushing  to  the  parent  as  they  are  oppressive  to  the  child. 
The  mother  and  father  will  not  always  have  to  shoulder 
the  burthen  of  maintenance  which  should  fall  on  the  Atlas 
shoulders  of  the  fatherland  and  motherland.  Pending 
such  reforms  and  emancipations,  a  shattering  break-up  of 
the  parental  home  must  remain  one  of  the  normal  incidents 
of  marriage.  The  parent  is  left  lonely  and  the  child  is  not. 
Woe  to  the  old  if  they  have  no  impersonal  interests,  no 
convictions,  no  public  causes  to  advance,  no  tastes  or 
hobbies!  It  is  well  to  be  a  mother  but  not  to  be  a  mother- 
in-law;  and  if  men  were  cut  off  artificially  from  intellec- 
tual and  public  interests  as  women  are,  the  father-in-law 
would  be  as  deplorable  a  figure  in  popular  tradition  as 
the  mother-in-law. 

It  is  not  to  be  wondered  at  that  some  people  hold  that 
blood  relationship  should  be  kept  a  secret  from  the  per- 
sons related,  and  that  the  happiest  condition  in  this  re- 
spect is  that  of  the  foundling  who,  if  he  ever  meets  his 
parents  or  brothers  or  sisters,  passes  them  by  without 
knowing  them.     And  for  such  a  view  there  is  this  to  be 


Parents  and  Children  ci 

said:  that  our  family  system  does  unquestionably  take 
the  natural  bond  between  members  of  the  same  family, 
which,  like  all  natural  bonds,  is  not  too  tight  to  be  borne, 
and  superimposes  on  it  a  painful  burden  of  forced,  incul- 
cated, suggested,  and  altogether  unnecessary  affection 
and  responsibility  which  we  should  do  well  to  get  rid  of 
by  making  relatives  as  independent  of  one  another  as 
possible. 

The  Fate  of  the  Family 

The  difficulty  of  inducing  people  to  talk  sensibly  about 
the  family  is  the  same  as  that  which  I  pointed  out  in  a 
previous  volume  as  confusing  discussions  of  marriage. 
Marriage  is  not  a  single  invariable  institution:  it  changes 
from  civilization  to  civilization,  from  religion  to  religion, 
from  civil  code  to  civil  code,  from  frontier  to  frontier. 
The  family  is  still  more  variable,  because  the  number  of 
persons  constituting  a  family,  unlike  the  number  of  persons 
constituting  a  marriage,  varies  from  one  to  twenty:  indeed, 
when  a  widower  with  a  family  marries  a  widow  with  a 
family,  and  the  two  produce  a  third  family,  even  that 
very  high  number  may  be  surpassed.  And  the  conditions 
may  vary  between  opposite  extremes:  for  example,  in  a 
London  or  Paris  slum  every  child  adds  to  the  burden  of 
poverty  and  helps  to  starve  the  parents  and  all  the  other 
children,  whereas  in  a  settlement  of  pioneer  colonists 
every  child,  from  the  moment  it  is  big  enough  to  lend  a 
hand  to  the  family  industry,  is  an  investment  in  which 
the  only  danger  is  that  of  temporary  over-capitalization. 
Then  there  are  the  variations  in  family  sentiment.  Some- 
times the  family  organization  is  as  frankly  political  as  the 
organization  of  an  army  or  an  industry:  fathers  being  no 
more  expected  to  be  sentimental  about  their  children 
than  colonels  about  soldiers,  or  factory  owners  about  their 
employees,  though  the  mother  may  be  allowed  a  little 
tenderness  if  her  character  is  weak.     The  Roman  father 


cii  Parents  and  Children 

was  a  despot:  the  Chinese  father  is  an  object  of  worship: 
the  sentimental  modern  western  father  is  often  a  play- 
fellow looked  to  for  toys  and  pocket-money.  The  farmer 
sees  his  children  constantly:  the  squire  sees  them  only 
during  the  holidays,  and  not  then  oftener  than  he  can 
help:  the  tram  conductor,  when  employed  by  a  joint  stock 
company,  sometimes  never  sees  them  at  all. 

Under  such  circumstances  phrases  like  The  Influence 
of  Home  Life,  The  Family,  The  Domestic  Hearth,  and 
so  on,  are  no  more  specific  than  The  Mammals,  or  The 
Man  In  The  Street;  and  the  pious  generalizations  founded 
so  glibly  on  them  by  our  sentimental  moralists  are  un- 
workable. When  households  average  twelve  persons 
with  the  sexes  about  equally  represented,  the  results  may 
be  fairly  good.  When  they  average  three  the  results  may 
be  very  bad  indeed;  and  to  lump  the  two  together  under 
the  general  term  The  Family  is  to  confuse  the  question 
hopelessly.  The  modern  small  family  is  much  too  stuffy: 
children  "brought  up  at  home"  in  it  are  unfit  for  society. 

But  here  again  circumstances  differ.  If  the  parents 
live  in  what  is  called  a  garden  suburb,  where  there  is  a 
good  deal  of  social  intercourse,  and  the  family,  instead  of 
keeping  itself  to  itself,  as  the  evil  old  saying  is,  and  glower- 
ing at  the  neighbors  over  the  blinds  of  the  long  street  in 
which  nobody  knows  his  neighbor  and  everyone  wishes 
to  deceive  him  as  to  his  income  and  social  importance,  is 
in  effect  broken  up  by  school  life,  by  out-of-door  habits, 
and  by  frank  neighborly  intercourse  through  dances  and 
concerts  and  theatricals  and  excursions  and  the  like,  fam- 
ilies of  four  may  turn  out  much  less  barbarous  citizens 
than  families  of  ten  which  attain  the  Boer  ideal  of  being 
out  of  sight  of  one  another's  chimney  smoke. 

All  one  can  say  is,  roughly,  that  the  homelier  the  home, 
and  the  more  familiar  the  family,  the  worse  for  everybody 
concerned.  The  family  ideal  is  a  humbug  and  a  nuisance: 
one  might  as  reasonably  talk  of  the  barrack  ideal,  or  the 


Parents  and  Children  ciii 

forecastle  ideal,  or  any  other  substitution  of  the  machinery 
of  social  organization  for  the  end  of  it,  which  must  always 
be  the  fullest  and  most  capable  life:  in  short,  the  most 
godly  life.  And  this  significant  word  reminds  us  that 
though  the  popular  conception  of  heaven  includes  a 
Holy  Family,  it  does  not  attach  to  that  family  the  notion 
of  a  separate  home,  or  a  private  nursery  or  kitchen  or 
mother-in-law,  or  anything  that  constitutes  the  family  as 
we  know  it.  Even  blood  relationship  is  miraculously 
abstracted  from  it;  and  the  Father  is  the  father  of  all 
children,  the  mother  the  mother  of  all  mothers  and  babies, 
and  the  Son  the  Son  of  Man  and  the  Savior  of  his  brothers: 
one  whose  chief  utterance  on  the  subject  of  the  conven- 
tional family  was  an  invitation  to  all  of  us  to  leave  our 
families  and  follow  him,  and  to  leave  the  dead  to  bury  the 
dead,  and  not  debauch  ourselves  at  that  gloomy  festival 
the  family  funeral,  with  its  sequel  of  hideous  mourning 
and  grief  which  is  either  affected  or  morbid. 

Family  Mourning 

I  do  not  know  how  far  this  detestable  custom  of  mourn- 
ing is  carried  in  France;  but  judging  from  the  appearance 
of  the  French  people  I  should  say  that  a  Frenchwoman 
goes  into  mourning  for  her  cousins  to  the  seventeenth 
degree.  The  result  is  that  when  I  cross  the  Channel  I 
seem  to  have  reached  a  country  devastated  by  war  or 
pestilence.  It  is  really  suffering  only  from  the  family. 
Will  anyone  pretend  that  England  has  not  the  best  of 
this  striking  difference?  Yet  it  is  such  senseless  and  un- 
natural conventions  as  this  that  make  us  so  impatient  of 
what  we  call  family  feeling.  Even  apart  from  its  insuffer- 
able pretensions,  the  family  needs  hearty  discrediting; 
for  there  is  hardly  any  vulnerable  part  of  it  that  could  not 
be  amputated  with  advantage. 


civ  Parents  and  Children 

Art  Teaching 

By  art  teaching  I  hasten  to  say  that  I  do  not  mean 
giving  children  lessons  in  freehand  drawing  and  perspec- 
tive. I  am  simply  calling  attention  to  the  fact  that  fine 
art  is  the  only  teacher  except  torture.  I  have  already 
pointed  out  that  nobody,  except  under  threat  of  torture, 
can  read  a  school  book.  The  reason  is  that  a  school  book 
is  not  a  work  of  art.  Similarly,  you  cannot  listen  to  a 
lesson  or  a  sermon  unless  the  teacher  or  the  preacher  is 
an  artist.  You  cannot  read  the  Bible  if  you  have  no  sense 
of  literary  art.  The  reason  why  the  continental  European 
is,  to  the  Englishman  or  American,  so  surprisingly  ignorant 
of  the  Bible,  is  that  the  authorized  English  version  is  a 
great  work  of  literary  art,  and  the  continental  versions 
are  comparatively  artless.  To  read  a  dull  book;  to  listen 
to  a  tedious  play  or  prosy  sermon  or  lecture;  to  stare  at 
uninteresting  pictures  or  ugly  buildings:  nothing,  short 
of  disease,  is  more  dreadful  than  this.  The  violence  done 
to  our  souls  by  it  leaves  injuries  and  produces  subtle  mal- 
adies which  have  never  been  properly  studied  by  psycho- 
pathologists.  Yet  we  are  so  inured  to  it  in  school,  where 
practically  all  the  teachers  are  bores  trying  to  do  the  work 
of  artists,  and  all  the  books  artless,  that  we  acquire  a 
truly  frightful  power  of  enduring  boredom.  We  even 
acquire  the  notion  that  fine  art  is  lascivious  and  destruc- 
tive to  the  character.  In  church,  in  the  House  of  Com- 
mons, at  public  meetings,  we  sit  solemnly  listening  to 
bores  and  twaddlers  because  from  the  time  we  could  walk 
or  speak  we  have  been  snubbed,  scolded,  bullied,  beaten 
and  imprisoned  whenever  we  dared  to  resent  being  bored 
or  twaddled  at,  or  to  express  our  natural  impatience  and 
derision  of  bores  and  twaddlers.  And  when  a  man  arises 
with  a  soul  of  sufficient  native  strength  to  break  the  bonds 
of  this  inculcated  reverence  and  to  expose  and  deride 
and  tweak  the  noses  of  our  humbugs  and  panjandrums, 


Parents  and  Children  cv 

like  Voltaire  or  Dickens,  we  are  shocked  and  scandalized, 
even  when  we  cannot  help  laughing.  Worse,  we  dread 
and  persecute  those  who  can  see  and  declare  the  truth, 
because  their  sincerity  and  insight  reflects  on  our  delusion 
and  blindness.  We  are  all  like  Nell  Gwynne's  footman, 
who  defended  Nell's  reputation  with  his  fists,  not  because 
he  believed  her  to  be  what  he  called  an  honest  woman, 
but  because  he  objected  to  be  scorned  as  the  footman  of 
one  who  was  no  better  than  she  should  be. 

This  wretched  power  of  allowing  ourselves  to  be  bored 
may  seem  to  give  the  fine  arts  a  chance  sometimes. 
People  will  sit  through  a  performance  of  Beethoven's 
ninth  symphony  or  of  Wagner's  Ring  just  as  they  will  sit 
through  a  dull  sermon  or  a  front  bench  politician  saying 
nothing  for  two  hours  whilst  his  unfortunate  country  is 
perishing  through  the  delay  of  its  business  in  Parliament. 
But  their  endurance  is  very  bad  for  the  ninth  symphony, 
because  they  never  hiss  when  it  is  murdered.  I  have  heard 
an  Italian  conductor  (no  longer  living)  take  the  adagio 
of  that  symphony  at  a  lively  allegretto,  slowing  down  for 
the  warmer  major  sections  into  the  speed  and  manner  of 
the  heroine's  death  song  in  a  Verdi  opera;  and  the  listeners, 
far  from  relieving  my  excruciation  by  rising  with  yells  of 
fury  and  hurling  their  programs  and  opera  glasses  at  the 
miscreant,  behaved  just  as  they  do  when  Richter  conducts 
it.  The  mass  of  imposture  that  thrives  on  this  combination 
of  ignorance  with  despairing  endurance  is  incalculable. 
Given  a  public  trained  from  childhood  to  stand  anything 
tedious,  and  so  saturated  with  school  discipline  that  even 
with  the  doors  open  and  no  schoolmasters  to  stop  them 
they  will  sit  there  helplessly  until  the  end  of  the  concert  or 
opera  gives  them  leave  to  go  home;  and  you  will  have  in 
great  capitals  hundreds  of  thousands  of  pounds  spent  every 
night  in  the  season  on  professedly  artistic  entertainments 
which  have  no  other  effect  on  fine  art  than  to  exacerbate 
the  hatred  in  which  it  is  already  secretly  held  in  England. 


cvi  Parents  and  Children 

Fortunately,  there  are  arts  that  cannot  be  cut  off  from 
the  people  by  bad  performances.  We  can  read  books  for 
ourselves;  and  we  can  play  a  good  deal  of  fine  music  for 
ourselves  with  the  help  of  a  pianola.  Nothing  stands 
between  us  and  the  actual  handwork  of  the  great  masters 
of  painting  except  distance;  and  modern  photographic 
methods  of  reproduction  are  in  some  cases  quite  and  in 
many  nearly  as  effective  in  conveying  the  artist's  message 
as  a  modern  edition  of  Shakespear's  plays  is  in  conveying 
the  message  that  first  existed  in  his  handwriting.  The 
reproduction  of  great  feats  of  musical  execution  is  already 
on  the  way:  the  phonograph,  for  all  its  wheezing  and 
snarling  and  braying,  is  steadily  improving  in  its  manners; 
and  what  with  this  improvement  on  the  one  hand,  and 
on  the  other  that  blessed  selective  faculty  which  enables 
us  to  ignore  a  good  deal  of  disagreeable  noise  if  there  is  a 
thread  of  music  in  the  middle  of  it  (few  critics  of  the  pho- 
nograph seem  to  be  conscious  of  the  very  considerable 
mechanical  noise  set  up  by  choirs  and  orchestras)  we 
have  at  last  reached  a  point  at  which,  for  example,  a 
person  living  in  an  English  village  where  the  church  music 
is  the  only  music,  and  that  music  is  made  by  a  few  well- 
intentioned  ladies  with  the  help  of  a  harmonium,  can 
hear  masses  by  Palestrina  very  passably  executed,  and 
can  thereby  be  led  to  the  discovery  that  Jackson  in  F  and 
Hymns  Ancient  and  Modern  are  not  perhaps  the  last 
word  of  beauty  and  propriety  in  the  praise  of  God. 

In  short,  there  is  a  vast  body  of  art  now  within  the  reach 
of  everybody.  The  difficulty  is  that  this  art,  which  alone 
can  educate  us  in  grace  of  body  and  soul,  and  which 
alone  can  make  the  history  of  the  past  live  for  us  or  the 
hope  of  the  future  shine  for  us,  which  alone  can  give 
delicacy  and  nobility  to  our  crude  lusts,  which  is  the  ap- 
pointed vehicle  of  inspiration  and  the  method  of  the  com- 
munion of  saints,  is  actually  branded  as  sinful  among  us 
because,  wherever  it  arises,  there  is  resistance  to  tyranny, 


Parents  and  Children  cvii 

breaking  of  fetters,  and  the  breath  of  freedom.  The 
attempt  to  suppress  art  is  not  wholly  successful:  we  might 
as  well  try  to  suppress  oxygen.  But  it  is  carried  far  enough 
to  inflict  on  huge  numbers  of  people  a  most  injurious  art 
starvation,  and  to  corrupt  a  great  deal  of  the  art  that  is 
tolerated.  You  will  find  in  England  plenty  of  rich  families 
with  little  more  culture  than  their  dogs  and  horses.  And 
you  will  find  poor  families,  cut  off  by  poverty  and  town 
life  from  the  contemplation  of  the  beauty  of  the  earth, 
with  its  dresses  of  leaves,  its  scarves  of  cloud,  and  its 
contours  of  hill  and  valley,  who  would  positively  be  hap- 
pier as  hogs,  so  little  have  they  cultivated  their  humanity 
by  the  only  effective  instrument  of  culture:  art.  The 
dearth  is  artificially  maintained  even  when  there  are  the 
means  of  satisfying  it.  Story  books  are  forbidden,  picture 
post  cards  are  forbidden,  theatres  are  forbidden,  operas 
are  forbidden,  circuses  are  forbidden,  sweetmeats  are  for- 
bidden, pretty  colors  are  forbidden,  all  exactly  as  vice  is 
forbidden.  The  Creator  is  explicitly  prayed  to,  and  im- 
plicitly convicted  of  indecency  every  day.  An  association 
of  vice  and  sin  with  everything  that  is  delightful  and  of 
goodness  with  everything  that  is  wretched  and  detestable 
is  set  up.  All  the  most  perilous  (and  glorious)  appetites 
and  propensities  are  at  once  inflamed  by  starvation  and 
uneducated  by  art.  All  the  wholesome  conditions  which 
art  imposes  on  appetite  are  waived:  instead  of  cultivated 
men  and  women  restrained  by  a  thousand  delicacies,  re- 
pelled by  ugliness,  chilled  by  vulgarity,  horrified  by  coarse- 
ness, deeply  and  sweetly  moved  by  the  graces  that  art  has 
revealed  to  them  and  nursed  in  them,  we  get  indiscrim- 
inate rapacity  in  pursuit  of  pleasure  and  a  parade  of  the 
grossest  stimulations  in  catering  for  it.  We  have  a  con- 
tinual clamor  for  goodness,  beauty,  virtue,  and  sanctity, 
with  such  an  appalling  inability  to  recognize  it  or  love  it 
when  it  arrives  that  it  is  more  dangerous  to  be  a  great 
prophet  or  poet  than  to  promote  twenty  companies  for 


cviii  Parents  and  Children 

swindling  simple  folk  out  of  their  savings.  Do  not  for  a 
moment  suppose  that  uncultivated  people  are  merely  in- 
different to  high  and  noble  qualities.  They  hate  them 
malignantly.  At  best,  such  qualities  are  like  rare  and 
beautiful  birds:  when  they  appear  the  whole  country 
takes  down  its  guns ;  but  the  birds  receive  the  statuary 
tribute  of  having  their  corpses  stuffed. 

And  it  really  all  comes  from  the  habit  of  preventing 
children  from  being  troublesome.  You  are  so  careful  of 
your  boy's  morals,  knowing  how  troublesome  they  may 
be,  that  you  keep  him  away  from  the  Venus  of  Milo  only 
to  find  him  in  the  arms  of  the  scullery  maid  or  someone 
much  worse.  You  decide  that  the  Hermes  of  Praxiteles 
and  Wagner's  Tristan  are  not  suited  for  young  girls;  and 
your  daughter  marries  somebody  appallingly  unlike  either 
Hermes  or  Tristan  solely  to  escape  from  your  parental 
protection.  You  have  not  stifled  a  single  passion  nor 
averted  a  single  danger:  you  have  depraved  the  passions 
by  starving  them,  and  broken  down  all  the  defences 
which  so  effectively  protect  children  brought  up  in  free- 
dom. You  have  men  who  imagine  themselves  to  be  min- 
isters of  religion  openly  declaring  that  when  they  pass 
through  the  streets  they  have  to  keep  out  in  the  wheeled 
traffic  to  avoid  the  temptations  of  the  pavement.  You 
have  them  organizing  hunts  of  the  women  who  tempt  them 
— poor  creatures  whom  no  artist  would  touch  without  a 
shudder — and  wildly  clamoring  for  more  clothes  to  dis- 
guise and  conceal  the  body,  and  for  the  abolition  of  pic- 
tures, statues,  theatres,  and  pretty  colors.  And  incredible 
as  it  seems,  these  unhappy  lunatics  are  left  at  large,  un- 
rebuked,  even  admired  and  revered,  whilst  artists  have 
to  struggle  for  toleration.  To  them  an  undraped  human 
body  is  the  most  monstrous,  the  most  blighting,  the 
most  obscene,  the  most  unbearable  spectacle  in  the  uni- 
verse. To  an  artist  it  is,  at  its  best,  the  most  admirable 
spectacle  in  nature,  and,  at  its  average,  an  object  of  indif- 


Parents  and  Children  cix 

ference.  If  every  rag  of  clothing  miraculously  dropped 
from  the  inhabitants  of  London  at  noon  tomorrow  (say 
as  a  preliminary  to  the  Great  Judgment),  the  artistic 
people  would  not  turn  a  hair;  but  the  artless  people  would 
go  mad  and  call  on  the  mountains  to  hide  them.  I  submit 
that  this  indicates  a  thoroughly  healthy  state  on  the  part 
of  the  artists,  and  a  thoroughly  morbid  one  on  the  part 
of  the  artless.  And  the  healthy  state  is  attainable  in  a 
cold  country  like  ours  only  by  familiarity  with  the  un- 
draped  figure  acquired  through  pictures,  statues,  and 
theatrical  representations  in  which  an  illusion  of  natural 
clotheslessness  is  produced  and  made  poetic. 

In  short,  we  all  grow  up  stupid  and  mad  to  just  the 
extent  to  which  we  have  not  been  artistically  educated; 
and  the  fact  that  this  taint  of  stupidity  and  madness  has 
to  be  tolerated  because  it  is  general,  and  is  even  boasted 
of  as  characteristically  English,  makes  the  situation  all 
the  worse.  It  is  becoming  exceedingly  grave  at  present, 
because  the  last  ray  of  art  is  being  cut  off  from  our  schools 
by  the  discontinuance  of  religious  education. 

The  Impossibility  of  Secular  Education 

Now  children  must  be  taught  some  sort  of  religion. 
Secular  education  is  an  impossibility.  Secular  education 
comes  to  this:  that  the  only  reason  for  ceasing  to  do  evil 
and  learning  to  do  well  is  that  if  you  do  not  you  will  be 
caned.  This  is  worse  than  being  taught  in  a  church  school 
that  if  you  become  a  dissenter  you  will  go  to  hell;  for  hell 
is  presented  as  the  instrument  of  something  eternal,  di- 
vine, and  inevitable:  you  cannot  evade  it  the  moment  the 
schoolmaster's  back  is  turned.  What  confuses  this  issue 
and  leads  even  highly  intelligent  religious  persons  to  ad- 
vocate secular  education  as  a  means  of  rescuing  children 
from  the  strife  of  rival  proselytizers  is  the  failure  to  dis- 
tinguish between  the  child's  personal  subjective  need  for 


ex  Parents  and  Children 

a  religion  and  its  right  to  an  impartially  communicated 
historical  objective  knowledge  of  all  the  creeds  and 
Churches.  Just  as  a  child,  no  matter  what  its  race  and 
color  may  be,  should  know  that  there  are  black  men  and 
brown  men  and  yellow  men,  and,  no  matter  what  its 
political  convictions  may  be,  that  there  are  Monarchists 
and  Republicans  and  Positivists,  Socialists  and  Unso- 
cialists,  so  it  should  know  that  there  are  Christians  and 
Mahometans  and  Buddhists  and  Shintoists  and  so  forth, 
and  that  they  are  on  the  average  just  as  honest  and  well- 
behaved  as  its  own  father.  For  example,  it  should  not  be 
told  that  Allah  is  a  false  god  set  up  by  the  Turks  and 
Arabs,  who  will  all  be  damned  for  taking  that  liberty; 
but  it  should  be  told  that  many  English  people  think  so, 
and  that  many  Turks  and  Arabs  think  the  converse  about 
English  people.  It  should  be  taught  that  Allah  is  simply 
the  name  by  which  God  is  known  to  Turks  and  Arabs,  who 
are  just  as  eligible  for  salvation  as  any  Christian.  Further, 
that  the  practical  reason  why  a  Turkish  child  should  pray 
in  a  mosque  and  an  English  child  in  a  church  is  that  as 
worship  is  organized  in  Turkey  in  mosques  in  the  name  of 
Mahomet  and  in  England  in  churches  in  the  name  of 
Christ,  a  Turkish  child  joining  the  Church  of  England  or 
an  English  child  following  Mahomet  will  find  that  it  has 
no  place  for  its  worship  and  no  organization  of  its  religion 
within  its  reach.  Any  other  teaching  of  the  history  and 
present  facts  of  religion  is  false  teaching,  and  is  politically 
extremely  dangerous  in  an  empire  in  which  a  huge  majority 
of  the  fellow  subjects  of  the  governing  island  do  not  pro- 
fess the  religion  of  that  island. 

But  this  objectivity,  though  intellectually  honest,  tells 
the  child  only  what  other  people  believe.  What  it  should 
itself  believe  is  quite  another  matter.  The  sort  of  Ra- 
tionalism which  says  to  a  child  "You  must  suspend  your 
judgment  until  you  are  old  enough  to  choose  your  reli- 
gion" is  Rationalism  gone  mad.     The  child  must  have  a 


Parents  and  Children  cxi 

conscience  and  a  code  of  honor  (which  is  the  essence  of  re- 
ligion) even  if  it  be  only  a  provisional  one,  to  be  revised  at 
its  confirmation.  For  confirmation  is  meant  to  signalize  a 
spiritual  coming  of  age,  and  may  be  a  repudiation.  Really 
active  souls  have  many  confirmations  and  repudiations  as 
their  life  deepens  and  their  knowledge  widens.  But  what 
is  to  guide  the  child  before  its  first  confirmation?  Not 
mere  orders,  because  orders  must  have  a  sanction  of  some 
sort  or  why  should  the  child  obey  them?  If,  as  a  Secular- 
ist, you  refuse  to  teach  any  sanction,  you  must  say  "You 
will  be  punished  if  you  disobey."  "Yes,"  says  the  child 
to  itself,  "if  I  am  found  out;  but  wait  until  your  back  is 
turned  and  I  will  do  as  I  like,  and  lie  about  it."  There 
can  be  no  objective  punishment  for  successful  fraud;  and 
as  no  espionage  can  cover  the  whole  range  of  a  child's 
conduct,  the  upshot  is  that  the  child  becomes  a  liar  and 
schemer  with  an  atrophied  conscience.  And  a  good  many 
of  the  orders  given  to  it  are  not  obeyed  after  all.  Thus 
the  Secularist  who  is  not  a  fool  is  forced  to  appeal  to  the 
child's  vital  impulse  towards  perfection,  to  the  divine 
spark;  and  no  resolution  not  to  call  this  impulse  an  im- 
pulse of  loyalty  to  the  Fellowship  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  or 
obedience  to  the  Will  of  God,  or  any  other  standard  theo- 
logical term,  can  alter  the  fact  that  the  Secularist  has 
stepped  outside  Secularism  and  is  educating  the  child 
religiously,  even  if  he  insists  on  repudiating  that  pious 
adverb  and  substituting  the  word  metaphysically. 

Natural  Selection  as  a  Religion 

We  must  make  up  our  minds  to  it  therefore  that  what- 
ever measures  we  may  be  forced  to  take  to  prevent  the 
recruiting  sergeants  of  the  Churches,  free  or  established, 
from  obtaining  an  exclusive  right  of  entry  to  schools,  we 
shall  not  be  able  to  exclude  religion  from  them.  The 
most  horrible  of  all  religions:  that  which  teaches  us  to 


cxii  Parents  and  Children 

regard  ourselves  as  the  helpless  prey  of  a  series  of  senseless 
accidents  called  Natural  Selection,  is  allowed  and  even 
welcomed  in  so-called  secular  schools  because  it  is,  in  a 
sense,  the  negation  of  all  religion;  but  for  school  purposes 
a  religion  is  a  belief  which  affects  conduct;  and  no  belief 
affects  conduct  more  radically  and  often  so  disastrously 
as  the  belief  that  the  universe  is  a  product  of  Natural 
Selection.    What  is  more,  the  theory  of  Natural  Selection 
cannot  be  kept  out  of  schools,  because  many  of  the  natural 
facts  that  present  the  most  plausible  appearance  of  design 
can  be  accounted  for  by  Natural  Selection;  and  it  would  be 
so  absurd  to  keep  a  child  in  delusive  ignorance  of  so  po- 
tent a  factor  in  evolution  as  to  keep  it  in  ignorance  of 
radiation  or  capillary  attraction.     Even  if  you   make  a 
religion  of  Natural  Selection,  and  teach  the  child  to  regard 
itself  as  the  irresponsible  prey  of  its  circumstances  and 
appetites  (or  its  heredity  as  you  will  perhaps  call  them), 
you  will  none  the  less  find  that  its  appetites  are  stimulated 
by  your  encouragement  and  daunted  by  your  discourage- 
ment; that  one  of  its  appetites  is  an  appetite  for  perfec- 
tion; that  if  you  discourage  this  appetite  and  encourage 
the  cruder  acquisitive  appetites  the  child  will  steal  and 
lie  and  be  a  nuisance  to  you;  and  that  if  you  encourage  its 
appetite  for  perfection  and  teach  it  to  attach  a  peculiar 
sacredness  to  it  and  place  it  before  the  other  appetites,  it 
will  be  a  much  nicer  child  and  you  will  have  a  much  easier 
job,   at  which  point  you  will,  in  spite  of  your  pseudo- 
scientific  jargon,  find  yourself  back  in  the  old-fashioned 
religious    teaching    as    deep    as    Dr.    Watts    and   in    fact 
fathoms  deeper. 

Moral  Instruction  Leagues 

And  now  the  voices  of  our  Moral  Instruction  Leagues 
will  be  lifted,  asking  whether  there  is  any  reason  why  the 
appetite  for  perfection  should  not  be  cultivated  in  ration- 


Parents  and  Children  cxiii 

ally  scientific  terms  instead  of  being  associated  with  the 
story  of  Jonah  and  the  great  fish  and  the  thousand  other 
tales  that  grow  up  round  religions.  Yes:  there  are  many 
reasons;  and  one  of  them  is  that  children  all  like  the  story 
of  Jonah  and  the  whale  (they  insist  on  its  being  a  whale 
in  spite  of  demonstrations  by  Bible  smashers  without  any 
sense  of  humor  that  Jonah  would  not  have  fitted  into  a 
whale's  gullet — as  if  the  story  would  be  credible  of  a  whale 
with  an  enlarged  throat)  and  that  no  child  on  earth  can 
stand  moral  instruction  books  or  catechisms  or  any  other 
statement  of  the  case  for  religion  in  abstract  terms.  The 
object  of  a  moral  instruction  book  is  not  to  be  rational,' 
scientific,  exact,  proof  against  controversy,  nor  even  cred- 
ible: its  object  is  to  make  children  good;  and  if  it  makes 
them  sick  instead  its  place  is  the  waste-paper  basket. 

Take  for  an  illustration  the  story  of  Elisha  and  the 
bears.  To  the  authors  of  the  moral  instruction  books  it 
is  in  the  last  degree  reprehensible.  It  is  obviously  not 
true  as  a  record  of  fact;  and  the  picture  it  gives  us  of  the 
temper  of  God  (which  is  what  interests  an  adult  reader) 
is  shocking  and  blasphemous.  But  it  is  a  capital  story  for 
a  child.  It  interests  a  child  because  it  is  about  bears; 
and  it  leaves  the  child  with  an  impression  that  children 
who  poke  fun  at  old  gentlemen  and  make  rude  remarks 
about  bald  heads  are  not  nice  children,  which  is  a  highly 
desirable  impression,  and  just  as  much  as  a  child  is  capa- 
ble of  receiving  from  the  story.  When  a  story  is  about 
God  and  a  child,  children  take  God  for  granted  and 
criticize  the  child.  Adults  do  the  opposite,  and  are  thereby 
led  to  talk  great  nonsense  about  the  bad  effect  of  Bible 
stories  on  infants. 

But  let  no  one  think  that  a  child  or  anyone  else  can 
learn  religion  from  a  teacher  or  a  book  or  by  any  academic 
process  whatever.  It  is  only  by  an  unfettered  access  to 
the  whole  body  of  Fine  Art:  that  is,  to  the  whole  body  of 
inspired  revelation,  that  we  can  build  up  that  conception 


cxiv  Parents  and  Children 

of  divinity  to  which  all  virtue  is  an  aspiration.  And  to 
hope  to  find  this  body  of  art  purified  from  all  that  is 
obsolete  or  dangerous  or  fierce  or  lusty,  or  to  pick  and 
choose  what  will  be  good  for  any  particular  child,  much 
less  for  all  children,  is  the  shallowest  of  vanities.  Such 
schoolmasterly  selection  is  neither  possible  nor  desirable. 
Ignorance  of  evil  is  not  virtue  but  imbecility:  admiring 
it  is  like  giving  a  prize  for  honesty  to  a  man  who  has  not 
stolen  your  watch  because  he  did  not  know  you  had  one. 
Virtue  chooses  good  from  evil;  and  without  knowledge 
there  can  be  no  choice.  And  even  this  is  a  dangerous  sim- 
plification of  what  actually  occurs.  We  are  not  choosing: 
we  are  growing.  Were  you  to  cut  all  of  what  you  call  the 
evil  out  of  a  child,  it  would  drop  dead.  If  you  try  to  stretch 
it  to  full  human  stature  when  it  is  ten  years  old,  you  will 
simply  pull  it  into  two  pieces  and  be  hanged.  And  when 
you  try  to  do  this  morally,  which  is  what  parents  and 
schoolmasters  are  doing  every  day,  you  ought  to  be  hanged; 
and  some  day,  when  we  take  a  sensible  view  of  the  matter, 
you  will  be;  and  serve  you  right.  The  child  does  not  stand 
between  a  good  and  a  bad  angel:  what  it  has  to  deal  with 
is  a  middling  angel  who,  in  normal  healthy  cases,  wants 
to  be  a  good  angel  as  fast  as  it  can  without  killing  itself 
in  the  process,  which  is  a  dangerous  one. 

Therefore  there  is  no  question  of  providing  the  child 
Avith  a  carefully  regulated  access  to  good  art.  There  is  no 
good  art,  any  more  than  there  is  good  anything  else  in 
the  absolute  sense.  Art  that  is  too  good  for  the  child 
will  either  teach  it  nothing  or  drive  it  mad,  as  the  Bible 
has  driven  many  people  mad  who  might  have  kept  their 
sanity  had  they  been  allowed  to  read  much  lower  forms 
of  literature.  The  practical  moral  is  that  we  must  read 
whatever  stories,  see  whatever  pictures,  hear  whatever 
songs  and  symphonies,  go  to  whatever  plays  we  like.  We 
shall  not  like  those  which  have  nothing  to  say  to  us;  and 
though  everyone  has  a  right  to  bias  our  choice,  no  one 


Parents  and  Children  cxv 

has  a  right  to  deprive  us  of  it  by  keeping  us  from  any 
work  of  art  or  any  work  of  art  from  us. 

I  may  now  say  without  danger  of  being  misunderstood 
that  the  popular  English  compromise  called  Cowper- 
Templeism  (unsectarian  Bible  education)  is  not  so  silly 
as  it  looks.  It  is  true  that  the  Bible  inculcates  half  a  dozen 
religions:  some  of  them  barbarous;  some  cynical  and  pes- 
simistic; some  amoristic  and  romantic;  some  sceptical  and 
challenging;  some  kindly,  simple,  and  intuitional;  some 
sophistical  and  intellectual;  none  suited  to  the  character 
and  conditions  of  western  civilization  unless  it  be  the 
Christianity  which  was  finally  suppressed  by  the  Cruci- 
fixion, and  has  never  been  put  into  practice  by  any  State 
before  or  since.  But  the  Bible  contains  the  ancient  lit- 
erature of  a  very  remarkable  Oriental  race;  and  the  imposi- 
tion of  this  literature,  on  whatever  false  pretences,  on  our 
children  left  them  more  literate  than  if  they  knew  no  lit- 
erature at  all,  which  was  the  practical  alternative.  And 
as  our  Authorized  Version  is  a  great  work  of  art  as  well, 
to  know  it  was  better  than  knowing  no  art,  which  also 
was  the  practical  alternative.  It  is  at  least  not  a  school 
book;  and  it  is  not  a  bad  story  book,  horrible  as  some  of 
the  stories  are.  Therefore  as  between  the  Bible  and  the 
blank  represented  by  secular  education,  the  choice  is  with 
the  Bible. 

The  Bible 

But  the  Bible  is  not  sufficient.  The  real  Bible  of  modern 
Europe  is  the  whole  body  of  great  literature  in  which  the 
inspiration  and  revelation  of  Hebrew  Scripture  has  been 
continued  to  the  present  day.  Nietzsche's  Thus  Spake 
Zoroaster  is  less  comforting  to  the  ill  and  unhappy  than 
the  Psalms;  but  it  is  much  truer,  subtler,  and  more  edify- 
ing. The  pleasure  we  get  from  the  rhetoric  of  the  book 
of  Job  and  its  tragic  picture  of  a  bewildered  soul  cannot 
disguise  the  ignoble  irrelevance  of  the  retort  of  God  with 


cxvi  Parents  and  Children 

which  it  closes,  or  supply  the  need  of  such  modern  revela- 
tions as  Shelley's  Prometheus  or  The  Niblung's  Ring  of 
Richard  Wagner.  There  is  nothing  in  the  Bible  greater 
in  inspiration  than  Beethoven's  ninth  symphony;  and 
the  power  of  modern  music  to  convey  that  inspiration  to 
a  modern  man  is  far  greater  than  that  of  Elizabethan 
English,  which  is,  except  for  people  steeped  in  the  Bible 
from  childhood  like  Sir  Walter  Scott  and  Ruskin,  a  dead 
language. 

Besides,  many  who  have  no  ear  for  literature  or  for 
music  are  accessible  to  architecture,  to  pictures,  to  statues, 
to  dresses,  and  to  the  arts  of  the  stage.     Every  device  of 
art  should  be  brought  to  bear  on  the  young;  so  that  they 
may  discover  some  form  of  it  that  delights  them  naturally; 
for  there  will  come  to  all  of  them  that  period  between 
dawning  adolescence  and  full  maturity  when  the  pleasures 
and  emotions  of  art  will  have  to  satisfy  cravings  which, 
if  starved  or  insulted,  may  become  morbid  and  seek  dis- 
graceful satisfactions,  and,  if  prematurely  gratified  other- 
wisethan  poetically,  may  destroy  the  stamina  of  the  race. 
And  it  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  the  most  dangerous  art 
for  this  necessary  purpose  is  the  art  that  presents  itself 
as  religious  ecstasy.     Young  people  are  ripe  for  love  long 
before  they  are  ripe  for  religion.    Only  a  very  foolish  person 
would   substitute  the   Imitation   of   Christ  for   Treasure 
Island  as  a  present  for  a  boy  or  girl,  or  for  Byron's  Don 
Juan  as  a  present  for  a  swain  or  lass.     Pickwick  is  the 
safest  saint  for  us  in  our  nonage.     Flaubert's  Temptation 
of  St  Anthony  is  an  excellent   book  for  a  man  of   fifty, 
perhaps  the  best  within  reach  as  a  healthy  study  of  vi- 
sionary ecstasy;  but  for  the  purposes  of  a  boy  of  fifteen 
Ivanhoe  and  the  Templar  make  a  much  better  saint  and 
devil.    And  the  boy  of  fifteen  will  find  this  out  for  himself 
if  he  is  allowed  to  wander  in  a  well-stocked  literary  garden, 
and  hear  bands  and  see  pictures  and  spend  his  pennies  on 
cinematograph  shows.     His  choice  may  often  be  rather 


Parents  and  Children  cxvii 

disgusting  to  his  elders  when  they  want  him  to  choose  the 
best  before  he  is  ready  for  it.  The  greatest  Protestant 
Manifesto  ever  written,  as  far  as  I  know,  is  Houston 
Chamberlain's  Foundations  of  the  Nineteenth  Century: 
everybody  capable  of  it  should  read  it.  Probably  the 
History  of  Maria  Monk  is  at  the  opposite  extreme  of 
merit  (this  is  a  guess:  I  have  never  read  it);  but  it  is 
certain  that  a  boy  let  loose  in  a  library  would  go  for  Maria 
Monk  and  have  no  use  whatever  for  Mr  Chamberlain. 
I  should  probably  have  read  Maria  Monk  myself  if  I  had 
not  had  the  Arabian  Nights  and  their  like  to  occupy  me 
better.  In  art,  children,  like  adults,  will  find  their  level 
if  they  are  left  free  to  find  it,  and  not  restricted  to  what 
adults  think  good  for  them.  Just  at  present  our  young 
people  are  going  mad  over  ragtimes,  apparently  because 
syncopated  rhythms  are  new  to  them.  If  they  had  learnt 
what  can  be  done  with  syncopation  from  Beethoven's 
third  Leonora  overture,  they  would  enjoy  the  ragtimes  all 
the  more;  but  they  would  put  them  in  their  proper  place 
as  amusing  vulgarities. 

Artist  Idolatry 

But  there  are  more  dangerous  influences  than  ragtimes 
waiting  for  people  brought  up  in  ignorance  of  fine  art. 
Nothing  is  more  pitiably  ridiculous  than  the  wild  worship 
of  artists  by  those  who  have  never  been  seasoned  in  youth 
to  the  enchantments  of  art.  Tenors  and  prima  donnas, 
pianists  and  violinists,  actors  and  actresses  enjoy  powers 
of  seduction  which  in  the  middle  ages  would  have  exposed 
them  to  the  risk  of  being  burnt  for  sorcery.  But  as  they 
exercise  this  power  by  singing,  playing,  and  acting,  no 
great  harm  is  done  except  perhaps  to  themselves.  Far 
graver  are  the  powers  enjoyed  by  brilliant  persons  who 
are  also  connoisseurs  in  art.  The  influence  they  can  ex- 
ercise on  young  people  who  have  been  brought  up  in  the 


cxviii  Parents  and  Children 

darkness  and  wretchedness  of  a  home  without  art,  and 
in  whom  a  natural  bent  towards  art  has  always  been  baf- 
fled and  snubbed,  is  incredible  to  those  who  have  not 
witnessed  and  understood  it.  He  (or  she)  who  reveals 
the  world  of  art  to  them  opens  heaven  to  them.  They 
become  satellites,  disciples,  worshippers  of  the  apostle. 
Now  the  apostle  may  be  a  voluptuary  without  much  con- 
science. Nature  may  have  given  him  enough  virtue  to 
suffice  in  a  reasonable  environment.  But  this  allowance 
may  not  be  enough  to  defend  him  against  the  tempta- 
tion and  demoralization  of  finding  himself  a  little  god 
on  the  strength  of  what  ought  to  be  a  quite  ordinary  cul- 
ture. He  may  find  adorers  in  all  directions  in  our  uncul- 
tivated society  among  people  of  stronger  character  than 
himself,  not  one  of  whom,  if  they  had  been  artistically 
educated,  would  have  had  anything  to  learn  from  him  or 
regarded  him  as  in  any  way  extraordinary  apart  from  his 
actual  achievements  as  an  artist.  Tartuffe  is  not  always 
a  priest.  Indeed  he  is  not  always  a  rascal:  he  is  often  a 
weak  man  absurdly  credited  with  omniscience  and  per- 
fection, and  taking  unfair  advantages  only  because  they 
are  offered  to  him  and  he  is  too  weak  to  refuse.  Give 
everyone  his  culture,  and  no  one  will  offer  him  more  than 
his  due. 

In  thus  delivering  our  children  from  the  idolatry  of 
the  artist,  we  shall  not  destroy  for  them  the  enchantment 
of  art:  on  the  contrary,  we  shall  teach  them  to  demand 
art  everywhere  as  a  condition  attainable  by  cultivating 
the  body,  mind,  and  heart.  Art,  said  Morris,  is  the  ex- 
pression of  pleasure  in  work.  And  certainly,  when  work 
is  made  detestable  by  slavery,  there  is  no  art.  It  is  only 
when  learning  is  made  a  slavery  by  tyrannical  teachers 
that  art  becomes  loathsome  to  the  pupil. 


Parents  and  Children  cxix 

"The  Machine" 

When  we  set  to  work  at  a  Constitution  to  secure  free- 
dom for  children,  we  had  better  bear  in  mind  that  the 
children  may  not  be  at  all  obliged  to  us  for  our  pains. 
Rousseau  said  that  men  are  born  free;  and  this  saying,  in 
its  proper  bearings,  was  and  is  a  great  and  true  saying; 
yet  let  it  not  lead  us  into  the  error  of  supposing  that  all 
men  long  for  freedom  and  embrace  it  when  it  is  offered 
to  them.  On  the  contrary,  it  has  to  be  forced  on  them; 
and  even  then  they  will  give  it  the  slip  if  it  is  not  religiously 
inculcated  and  strongly  safeguarded. 

Besides,  men  are  born  docile,  and  must  in  the  nature  of 
things  remain  so  with  regard  to  everything  they  do  not 
understand.  Now  political  science  and  the  art  of  gov- 
ei-nment  are  among  the  things  they  do  not  understand, 
and  indeed  are  not  at  present  allowed  to  understand. 
They  can  be  enslaved  by  a  system,  as  we  are  at  present, 
because  it  happens  to  be  there,  and  nobody  understands 
it.  An  intelligently  worked  Capitalist  system,  as  Comte 
saw,  would  give  us  all  that  most  of  us  are  intelligent  enough 
to  want.  What  makes  it  produce  such  unspeakably  vile 
results  is  that  it  is  an  automatic  system  which  is  as  little 
understood  by  those  who  profit  by  it  in  money  as  by  those 
who  are  starved  and  degraded  by  it:  our  millionaires  and 
statesmen  are  manifestly  no  more  "captains  of  industry" 
or  scientific  politicians  than  our  bookmakers  are  mathe- 
maticians. For  some  time  past  a  significant  word  has 
been  coming  into  use  as  a  substitute  for  Destiny,  Fate, 
and  Providence.  It  is  "The  Machine":  the  machine  that 
has  no  god  in  it.  Why  do  governments  do  nothing  in  spite 
of  reports  of  Royal  Commissions  that  establish  the  most 
frightful  urgency?  Why  do  our  philanthropic  millionaires 
do  nothing,  though  they  are  ready  to  throw  bucketfuls  of 
gold  into  the  streets?  The  Machine  will  not  let  them. 
Always  the  Machine.     In  short,  they  dont  know  how. 


cxx  Parents  and  Children 

They  try  to  reform  Society  as  an  old  lady  might  try  to 
restore  a  broken  down  locomotive  by  prodding  it  with  a 
knitting  needle.  And  this  is  not  at  all  because  they  are 
born  fools,  but  because  they  have  been  educated,  not 
into  manhood  and  freedom,  but  into  blindness  and  slavery 
by  their  parents  and  schoolmasters,  themselves  the  vic- 
tims of  a  similar  misdirection,  and  consequently  of  The 
Machine.  They  do  not  want  liberty.  They  have  not 
been  educated  to  want  it.  They  choose  slavery  and  in- 
equality; and  all  the  other  evils  are  automatically  added 
to  them. 

And  yet  we  must  have  The  Machine.  It  is  only  in  un- 
skilled hands  under  ignorant  direction  that  machinery  is 
dangerous.  We  can  no  more  govern  modern  communities 
without  political  machinery  than  we  can  feed  and  clothe 
them  without  industrial  machinery.  Shatter  The  Ma- 
chine, and  you  get  Anarchy.  And  yet  The  Machine  works 
so  detestably  at  present  that  we  have  people  who  advocate 
Anarchy  and  call  themselves  Anarchists. 

The  Provocation  to  Anarchism 

What  is  valid  in  Anarchism  is  that  all  Governments  try 
to  simplify  their  task  by  destroying  liberty  and  glorifying 
authority  in  general  and  their  own  deeds  in  particular. 
But  the  difficulty  in  combining  law  and  order  with  free 
institutions  is  not  a  natural  one.  It  is  a  matter  of  incul- 
cation. If  people  are  brought  up  to  be  slaves,  it  is  useless 
and  dangerous  to  let  them  loose  at  the  age  of  twenty-one 
and  say  "Now  you  are  free."  No  one  with  the  tamed  soul 
and  broken  spirit  of  a  slave  can  be  free.  It  is  like  saying 
to  a  laborer  brought  up  on  a  family  income  of  thirteen 
shillings  a  week,  "Here  is  one  hundred  thousand  pounds: 
now  you  are  wealthy."  Nothing  can  make  such  a  man 
really  wealthy.  Freedom  and  wealth  are  difficult  and 
responsible  conditions  to  which  men  must  be  accustomed 


Parents  and  Children  cxxi 

and  socially  trained  from  birth.  A  nation  that  is  free  at 
twenty-one  is  not  free  at  all;  just  as  a  man  first  enriched 
at  fifty  remains  poor  all  his  life,  even  if  he  does  not  curtail 
it  by  drinking  himself  to  death  in  the  first  wild  ecstasy  of 
being  able  to  swallow  as  much  as  he  likes  for  the  first 
time.  You  cannot  govern  men  brought  up  as  slaves 
otherwise  than  as  slaves  are  governed.  You  may  pile 
Bills  of  Right  and  Habeas  Corpus  Acts  on  Great  Charters; 
promulgate  American  Constitutions;  burn  the  chateaux 
and  guillotine  the  seigneurs;  chop  off  the  heads  of  kings 
and  queens  and  set  up  Democracy  on  the  ruins  of  feudal- 
ism: the  end  of  it  all  for  us  is  that  already  in  the  twentieth 
century  there  has  been  as  much  brute  coercion  and  savage 
intolerance,  as  much  flogging  and  hanging,  as  much  im- 
pudent injustice  on  the  bench  and  lustful  rancor  in  the 
pulpit,  as  much  naive  resort  to  torture,  persecution,  and 
suppression  of  free  speech  and  freedom  of  the  press,  as 
much  war,  as  much  of  the  vilest  excess  of  mutilation, 
rapine,  and  delirious  indiscriminate  slaughter  of  helpless 
non-combatants,  old  and  young,  as  much  prostitution  of 
professional  talent,  literary  and  political,  in  defence  of 
manifest  wrong,  as  much  cowardly  sycophancy  giving 
fine  names  to  all  this  villainy  or  pretending  that  it  is 
"greatly  exaggerated,"  as  we  can  find  any  record  of  from 
the  days  when  the  advocacy  of  liberty  was  a  capital  offence 
and  Democracy  was  hardly  thinkable.  Democracy  ex- 
hibits the  vanity  of  Louis  XIV,  the  savagery  of  Peter  of 
Russia,  the  nepotism  and  provinciality  of  Napoleon,  the 
fickleness  of  Catherine  II:  in  short,  all  the  childishnesses 
of  all  the  despots  without  any  of  the  qualities  that  enabled 
the  greatest  of  them  to  fascinate  and  dominate  their 
contemporaries. 

And  the  flatterers  of  Democracy  are  as  impudently 
servile  to  the  successful,  and  insolent  to  common  honest 
folk,  as  the  flatterers  of  the  monarchs.  Democracy  in 
America  has  led  to  the   withdrawal  of  ordinary  refined 


cxxii  Parents  and  Children 

persons  from  politics;  and  the  same  result  is  coming  in 
England  as  fast  as  we  make  Democracy  as  democratic  as 
it  is  in  America.  This  is  true  also  of  popular  religion:  it 
is  so  horribly  irreligious  that  nobody  with  the  smallest 
pretence  to  culture,  or  the  least  inkling  of  what  the  great 
prophets  vainly  tried  to  make  the  world  understand,  will 
have  anything  to  do  with  it  except  for  purely  secular 
reasons. 

Imagination 

Before  we  can  clearly  understand  how  baleful  is  this 
condition  of  intimidation  in  which  we  live,  it  is  necessary 
to  clear  up  the  confusion  made  by  our  use  of  the  word 
imagination  to  denote  two  very  different  powers  of  mind. 
One  is  the  power  to  imagine  things  as  they  are  not:  this 
I  call  the  romantic  imagination.  The  other  is  the  power 
to  imagine  things  as  they  are  without  actually  sensing 
them;  and  this  I  will  call  the  realistic  imagination.  Take 
for  example  marriage  and  war.  One  man  has  a  vision  of 
perpetual  bliss  with  a  domestic  angel  at  home,  and  of 
flashing  sabres,  thundering  guns,  victorious  cavalry 
charges,  and  routed  enemies  in  the  field.  That  is  romantic 
imagination;  and  the  mischief  it  does  is  incalculable.  It 
begins  in  silly  and  selfish  expectations  of  the  impossible, 
and  ends  in  spiteful  disappointment,  sour  grievance, 
cynicism,  and  misanthropic  resistance  to  any  attempt  to 
better  a  hopeless  world.  The  wise  man  knows  that  imag- 
ination is  not  only  a  means  of  pleasing  himself  and  beguil- 
ing tedious  hours  with  romances  and  fairy  tales  and  fools' 
paradises  (a  quite  defensible  and  delightful  amusement 
when  you  know  exactly  what  you  are  doing  and  where 
fancy  ends  and  facts  begin),  but  also  a  means  of  foreseeing 
and  being  prepared  for  realities  as  yet  unexperienced, 
and  of  testing  the  possibility  and  desirability  of  serious 
Utopias.  He  does  not  expect  his  wife  to  be  an  angel;  nor 
does  he  overlook  the  facts  that  war  depends  on  the  rous- 


Parents  and  Children  cxxiii 

ing  of  all  the  murderous  blackguardism  still  latent  in 
mankind;  that  every  victory  means  a  defeat;  that  fatigue, 
hunger,  terror,  and  disease  are  the  raw  material  which 
romancers  work  up  into  military  glory;  and  that  soldiers 
for  the  most  part  go  to  war  as  children  go  to  school,  be- 
cause they  are  afraid  not  to.  They  are  afraid  even  to  say 
they  are  afraid,  as  such  candor  is  punishable  by  death  in 
the  military  code. 

A  very  little  realistic  imagination  gives  an  ambitious 
person  enormous  power  over  the  multitudinous  victims 
of  the  romantic  imagination.  For  the  romancer  not  only 
pleases  himself  with  fictitious  glories:  he  also  terrifies 
himself  with  imaginary  dangers.  He  does  not  even  pic- 
ture what  these  dangers  are:  he  conceives  the  unknown 
as  always  dangerous.  When  you  say  to  a  realist  "You 
must  do  this"  or  "You  must  not  do  that,"  he  instantly 
asks  what  will  happen  to  him  if  he  does  (or  does  not,  as 
the  case  may  be).  Failing  an  unromantic  convincing 
answer,  he  does  just  as  he  pleases  unless  he  can  find  for 
himself  a  real  reason  for  refraining.  In  short,  though  you 
can  intimidate  him,  you  cannot  bluff  him.  But  you  can 
always  bluff  the  romantic  person :  indeed  his  grasp  of  real 
considerations  is  so  feeble  that  you  find  it  necessary  to 
bluff  him  even  when  you  have  solid  considerations  to 
offer  him  instead.  The  campaigns  of  Napoleon,  with 
their  atmosphere  of  glory,  illustrate  this.  In  the  Rus- 
sian campaign  Napoleon's  marshals  achieved  miracles  of 
bluff,  especially  Ney,  who,  with  a  handful  of  men,  mon- 
strously outnumbered,  repeatedly  kept  the  Russian  troops 
paralyzed  with  terror  by  pure  bounce.  Napoleon  himself, 
much  more  a  realist  than  Ney  (that  was  why  he  dominated 
him),  would  probably  have  surrendered;  for  sometimes 
the  bravest  of  the  brave  will  achieve  successes  never  at- 
tempted by  the  cleverest  of  the  clever.  Wellington  was 
a  completer  realist  than  Napoleon.  It  was  impossible  to 
persuade  Wellington  that  he  was  beaten  until  he  actually 


cxxiv  Parents  and  Children 

was  beaten.  He  was  unbluffable;  and  if  Napoleon  had 
understood  the  nature  of  Wellington's  strength  instead 
of  returning  Wellington's  snobbish  contempt  for  him  by 
an  academic  contempt  for  Wellington,  he  would  not  have 
left  the  attack  at  Waterloo  to  Ney  and  D'Erlon,  who,  on 
that  field,  did  not  know  when  they  were  beaten,  whereas 
Wellington  knew  precisely  when  he  was  not  beaten.  The 
unbluffable  would  have  triumphed  anyhow,  probably, 
because  Napoleon  was  an  academic  soldier,  doing  the  aca- 
demic thing  (the  attack  in  columns  and  so  forth)  with 
superlative  ability  and  energy;  whilst  Wellington  was  an 
original  soldier  who,  instead  of  outdoing  the  terrible  aca- 
demic columns  with  still  more  terrible  and  academic 
columns,  outwitted  them  with  the  thin  red  line,  not  of 
heroes,  but,  as  this  uncompromising  realist  never  hesitated 
to  testify,  of  the  scum  of  the  earth. 

Government  by  Bullies 

These  picturesque  martial  incidents  are  being  repro- 
duced every  day  in  our  ordinary  life.  We  are  bluffed  by 
hardy  simpletons  and  headstrong  bounders  as  the  Russians 
were  bluffed  by  Ney;  and  our  Wellingtons  are  threadbound 
by  slave-democracy  as  Gulliver  was  threadbound  by  the 
Lilliputians.  We  are  a  mass  of  people  living  in  a  submis- 
sive routine  to  which  we  have  been  drilled  from  our 
childhood.  When  you  ask  us  to  take  the  simplest  step 
outside  that  routine,  we  say  shyly,  "Oh,  I  really  couldnt," 
or  "Oh,  I  shouldnt  like  to,"  without  being  able  to  point 
out  the  smallest  harm  that  could  possibly  ensue:  victims., 
not  of  a  rational  fear  of  real  dangers,  but  of  pure  abstract 
fear,  the  quintessence  of  cowardice,  the  very  negation  of 
"the  fear  of  God."  Dotted  about  among  us  are  a  few 
spirits  relatively  free  from  this  inculcated  paralysis, 
sometimes  because  they  are  half-witted,  sometimes  be- 
cause they  are  unscrupulously  selfish,  sometimes  because 


Parents  and  Children  cxxv 

they  are  realists  as  to  money  and  unimaginative  as  to 
other  things,  sometimes  even  because  they  are  exception- 
ally able,  but  always  because  they  are  not  afraid  of  shad- 
ows nor  oppressed  with  nightmares.  And  we  see  these 
few  rising  as  if  by  magic  into  power  and  affluence,  and 
forming,  with  the  millionaires  who  have  accidentally 
gained  huge  riches  by  the  occasional  windfalls  of  our  com- 
merce, the  governing  class.  Now  nothing  is  more  disas- 
trous than  a  governing  class  that  does  not  know  how  to 
govern.  And  how  can  this  rabble  of  the  casual  products 
of  luck,  cunning,  and  folly,  be  expected  to  know  how  to 
govern?  The  merely  lucky  ones  and  the  hereditary  ones 
do  not  owe  their  position  to  their  qualifications  at  all. 
As  to  the  rest,  the  realism  which  seems  their  essential 
qualification  often  consists  not  only  in  a  lack  of  romantic 
imagination,  which  lack  is  a  merit,  but  of  the  realistic, 
constructive,  Utopian  imagination,  which  lack  is  a  ghastly 
defect.  Freedom  from  imaginative  illusion  is  therefore 
no  guarantee  whatever  of  nobility  of  character:  that  is 
why  inculcated  submissiveness  makes  us  slaves  to  people 
much  worse  than  ourselves,  and  why  it  is  so  important 
that  submissiveness  should  no  longer  be  inculcated. 

And  yet  as  long  as  you  have  the  compulsory  school  as 
we  know  it,  we  shall  have  submissiveness  inculcated. 
What  is'more,  until  the  active  hours  of  child  life  are  organ- 
ized separately  from  the  active  hours  of  adult  life,  so  that 
adults  can  enjoy  the  society  of  children  in  reason  without 
being  tormented,  disturbed,  harried,  burdened,  and  hind- 
ered in  their  work  by  them  as  they  would  be  now  if  there 
were  no  compulsory  schools  and  no  children  hypnotized 
into  the  belief  that  they  must  tamely  go  to  them  and  be 
imprisoned  and  beaten  and  over-tasked  in  them,  we  shall 
have  schools  under  one  pretext  or  another;  and  we  shall 
have  all  the  evil  consequences  and  all  the  social  hopeless- 
ness that  result  from  turning  a  nation  of  potential  freemen 
and  freewomen  into  a  nation  of  two-legged  spoilt  spaniels 


cxxvi  Parents  and  Children 

with  everything  crushed  out  of  their  nature  except  dread 
of  the  whip.  Liberty  is  the  breath  of  life  to  nations;  and 
liberty  is  the  one  thing  that  parents,  schoolmasters,  and 
rulers  spend  their  lives  in  extirpating  for  the  sake  of  an 
immediately  quiet  and  finally  disastrous  life. 


MISALLIANCE 
XXI 

1910 


MISALLIANCE 

Johnny  Tarleton,  an  ordinary  young  business  man  of 
thirty  or  less,  is  taking  his  weekly  Friday  to  Tuesday  in  the 
house  of  his  father,  John  Tarleton,  who  has  made  a  great  deal 
of  money  out  of  Tarleton  s  Underwear.  The  house  is  in 
Surrey,  on  the  slope  of  Hindhead;  and  Johnny,  reclining, 
novel  in  hand,  in  a  swinging  chair  with  a  little  awning  above 
it,  is  enshrined  in  a  spacious  half  hemisphere  of  glass  which 
forms  a  pavilion  commanding  the  garden,  and,  beyond  it,  a 
barren  but  lovely  landscape  of  hill  profile  with  fir  trees,  com- 
mons of  bracken  and  gorse,  and  wonderful  cloud  pictures. 

The  glass  pavilion  springs  from  a  bridgelike  arch  in  the 
wall  of  the  house,  through  which  one  comes  into  a  big  hall  with 
tiled  flooring,  which  suggests  that  the  proprietor' 's  notion  of 
domestic  luxury  is  founded  on  the  lounges  of  week-end  hotels. 
The  arch  is  not  quite  in  the  centre  of  the  wall.  There  is  more 
wall  to  its  right  than  to  its  left,  and  this  space  is  occupied  by 
a  hat  rack  and  umbrella  stand  in  which  tennis  rackets,  white 
parasols,  caps,  Panama  hats,  and  other  summery  articles  are 
bestowed.  Just  through  the  arch  at  this  corner  stands  a  new 
portable  Turkish  bath,  recently  unpacked,  with  its  crate  be- 
side it,  and  on  the  crate  the  drawn  nails  and  the  hammer  used 
in  unpacking.  Near  the  crate  are  open  boxes  of  garden  games: 
bowls  and  croquet.  Nearly  in  the  middle  of  the  glass  wall  of 
the  pavilion  is  a  door  giving  on  the  garden,  with  a  couple  of 
steps  to  surmount  the  hot-water  pipes  which  skirt  the  glass. 
At  intervals  round  the  pavilion  are  marble  pillars  with  speci- 
mens of  Viennese  pottery  on  them,  very  flamboyant  in  colour 
and  florid  in  design.  Between  them  are  folded  garden  chairs 
flung  anyhow  against  the  pipes.  In  the  side  walls  are  two 
doors:   one  near  the  hat  stand,  leading  to  the  interior  of  the 

3 


4  Misalliance 

house,  the  other  on  the  opposite  side  and  at  the  other  end,  lead- 
ing to  the  vestibule. 

There  is  no  solid  furniture  except  a  sideboard  which  stands 
against  the  wall  between  the  vestibule  door  and  the  pavilion,  a 
small  writing  table  with  a  blotter,  a  rack  for  telegram  forms 
and  stationery,  and  a  wastepaper  basket,  standing  out  in  the 
kail  near  the  sideboard,  and  a  lady's  worktable,  with  two 
chairs  at  it,  towards  the  other  side  of  the  lounge.  The  writing 
table  has  also  two  chairs  at  it.  On  the  sideboard  there  is  a 
ta?italus,  liqueur  bottles,  a  syphon,  a  glass  jug  of  lemonade, 
tumblers,  and  every  convenience  for  casual  drinking.  Also  a 
plate  of  sponge  cakes,  and  a  highly  ornate  punchbowl  in  the 
same  style  as  the  keramic  display  in  the  pavilion.  Wicker 
chairs  and  little  bamboo  tables  with  ash  trays  and  boxes  of 
matches  on  them  are  scattered  in  all  directions.  In  the  pavil- 
ion, which  is  flooded  with  sunshine,  is  the  elaborate  patent 
swing  seat  and  awning  in  which  Johnny  reclines  with  his 
novel.     There  are  two  wicker  chairs  right  and  left  of  him. 

Bentley  Summerhays,  one  of  those  smallish,  thinskinned 
youths,  who  from  17  to  70  retain  unaltered  the  mental  airs  of 
the  later  and  the  physical  appearance  of  the  earlier  age,  ap- 
pears in  the  garden  and  comes  through  the  glass  door  into  the 
pavilion.  He  is  unmistakably  a  grade  above  Johnny  socially; 
and  though  he  looks  sensitive  enough,  his  assurance  and  his 
high  voice  are  a  little  exasperating. 

Johnny.    Hallo!     Wheres  your  luggage? 

Bentley.  I  left  it  at  the  station.  Ive  walked  up  from 
Haslemere.    [He  goes  to  the  hat  stand  and  hangs  up  his  hat]. 

Johnny    [shortly]  Oh!    And  who's  to  fetch  it? 

Bentley.  Dont  know.  Dont  care.  Providence,  prob- 
ably.    If  not,  your  mother  will  have  it  fetched. 

Johnny.    Not  her  business,  exactly,  is  it? 

Bentley  [returning  to  the  pavilion]  Of  course  not.  Thats 
why  one  loves  her  for  doing  it.  Look  here:  chuck  away 
your  silly  week-end  novel,  and  talk  to  a  chap.     After  a 


Misalliance  5 

week  in  that  filthy  office  my  brain  is  simply  blue-mouldy. 
Lets  argue  about  something  intellectual.  [He  throws  him- 
self into  the  wicker  chair  on  Johnny's  right]. 

Johnny  [straightening  up  in  the  swing  with  a  yell  of  pro- 
test] No.  Now  seriously,  Bunny,  Ive  come  down  here  to 
have  a  pleasant  week-end;  and  I'm  not  going  to  stand  your 
confounded  arguments.  If  you  want  to  argue,  get  out  of 
this  and  go  over  to  the  Congregationalist  minister's.  He's 
a  nailer  at  arguing.    He  likes  it. 

Bentley.  You  cant  argue  with  a  person  when  his  liveli- 
hood depends  on  his  not  letting  you  convert  him.  And 
would  you  mind  not  calling  me  Bunny.  My  name  is 
Bentley  Summerhays,  which  you  please. 

Johnny.    Whats  the  matter  with  Bunny? 

Bentley.  It  puts  me  in  a  false  position.  Have  you  ever 
considered  the  fact  that  I  was  an  afterthought? 

Johnny.  An  afterthought?  What  do  you  mean  by 
that? 

Bentley.   I — 

Johnny.  No,  stop:  I  dont  want  to  know.  It's  only  a 
dodge  to  start  an  argument. 

Bentley.  Dont  be  afraid :  it  wont  overtax  your  brain. 
My  father  was  44  when  I  was  born.  My  mother  was  41. 
There  was  twelve  years  between  me  and  the  next  eldest. 
I  was  unexpected.  I  was  probably  unintentional.  My 
brothers  and  sisters  are  not  the  least  like  me.  Theyre  the 
regular  thing  that  you  always  get  in  the  first  batch  from 
young  parents:  quite  pleasant,  ordinary,  do-the-regular- 
thing  sort:   all  body  and  no  brains,  like  you. 

Johnny.    Thank  you. 

Bentley.  Dont  mention  it,  old  chap.  Now  I'm  differ- 
ent. By  the  time  I  was  born,  the  old  couple  knew  some- 
thing. So  I  came  out  all  brains  and  no  more  body  than  is 
absolutely  necessary.  I  am  really  a  good  deal  older  than 
you,  though  you  were  born  ten  years  sooner.  Everybody 
feels  that  when  they  hear  us  talk;    consequently,  though 


6  Misalliance 

it's  quite  natural  to  hear  me  calling  you  Johnny,  it  sounds 
ridiculous  and  unbecoming  for  you  to  call  me  Bunny. 
[He  rises], 

Johnny.  Does  it,  by  George?  You  stop  me  doing  it  if 
you  can:   thats  all. 

Bentley.  If  you  go  on  doing  it  after  Ive  asked  you  not, 
;youll  feel  an  awful  swine.  [He  strolls  away  carelessly  to  the 
sideboard  with  his  eye  on  the  sponge  cakes].  At  least  I  should ; 
but  I  suppose  youre  not  so  particular. 

Johnny  [rising  vengefully  and  following  Bentley,  who  is 
forced  to  turn  and  listen]  I'll  tell  you  what  it  is,  my  boy: 
you  want  a  good  talking  to;  and  I'm  going  to  give  it  to 
you.  If  you  think  that  because  your  father's  a  K.C.B., 
and  you  want  to  marry  my  sister,  you  can  make  yourself  as 
nasty  as  you  please  and  say  what  you  like,  youre  mistaken. 
Let  me  tell  you  that  except  Hypatia,  not  one  person  in 
this  house  is  in  favor  of  her  marrying  you;  and  I  dont 
believe  shes  happy  about  it  herself.  The  match  isnt  set- 
tled yet:  dont  forget  that.  Youre  on  trial  in  the  office  be- 
cause the  Governor  isnt  giving  his  daughter  money  for  an 
idle  man  to  live  on  her.  Youre  on  trial  here  because  my 
mother  thinks  a  girl  should  know  what  a  man  is  like  in 
the  house  before  she  marries  him.  Thats  been  going  on 
for  two  months  now;  and  whats  the  result?  Youve  got 
yourself  thoroughly  disliked  in  the  office;  and  youre  get- 
ting yourself  thoroughly  disliked  here,  all  through  your 
bad  manners  and  your  conceit,  and  the  damned  impu- 
dence you  think  clever. 

Bentley  [deeply  wounded  and  trying  hard  to  control  him- 
self] Thats  enough,  thank  you.  You  dont  suppose,  I  hope, 
that  I  should  have  come  down  if  I  had  known  that  that  was 
how  you  felt  about  me.    [He  makes  for  the  vestibule  door]. 

Johnny  [collaring  him].  No:  you  dont  run  away.  I'm 
going  to  have  this  out  with  you.  Sit  down:  d'y'  hear? 
[Bentley  attempts  to  go  with  dignity.  Johnny  slings  him  into 
a  chair  at  the  writing  table,  where  he  sits,  bitterly  humiliated, 


Misalliance  7 

but  afraid  to  speak  lest  he  should  burst  into  tears].  Thats  the 
advantage  of  having  more  body  than  brains,  you  see:  it 
enables  me  to  teach  you  manners;  and  I'm  going  to  do  it 
too.  Youre  a  spoilt  young  pup;  and  you  need  a  jolly  good 
licking.  And  if  youre  not  careful  youll  get  it:  I'll  see  to 
that  next  time  you  call  me  a  swine. 

Bentley.  I  didnt  call  you  a  swine.  But  [bursting  into  a 
fury  of  tears]  you  are  a  swine:  youre  a  beast:  youre  a 
brute:  youre  a  cad:  youre  a  liar:  youre  a  bully:  I  should 
like  to  wring  your  damned  neck  for  you. 

Johnny  [with  a  derisive  laugh]  Try  it,  my  son.  [Bent- 
ley  gives  an  inarticulate  sob  of  rage].  Fighting  isnt  in  your 
line.  Youre  too  small  and  youre  too  childish.  I  always  sus- 
pected that  your  cleverness  wouldnt  come  to  very  much 
when  it  was  brought  up  against  something  solid:  some 
decent  chap's  fist,  for  instance. 

Bentley.  I  hope  your  beastly  fist  may  come  up  against 
a  mad  bull  or  a  prizefighter's  nose,  or  something  solider 
than  me.  I  dont  care  about  your  fist;  but  if  everybody 
here  dislikes  me —  [he  is  checked  by  a  sob].  Well,  I  dont 
care.  [Trying  to  recover  himself]  I'm  sorry  I  intruded:  I 
didnt  know.  [Breaking  down  again]  Oh  you  beast!  you 
pig!    Swine,  swine,  swine,  swine,  swine!    Now! 

Johnny.  All  right,  my  lad,  all  right.  Sling  your  mud  as 
hard  as  you  please:  it  wont  stick  to  me.  What  I  want  to 
know  is  this.  How  is  it  that  your  father,  who  I  suppose  is 
the  strongest  man  England  has  produced  in  our  time — 

Bentley.  You  got  that  out  of  your  halfpenny  paper.  A 
lot  you  know  about  him! 

Johnny.  I  dont  set  up  to  be  able  to  do  anything  but 
admire  him  and  appreciate  him  and  be  proud  of  him  as  an 
Englishman.  If  it  wasnt  for  my  respect  for  him,  I  wouldnt 
have  stood  your  cheek  for  two  days,  let  alone  two  months. 
But  what  I  cant  understand  is  why  he  didnt  lick  it  out  of 
you  when  you  were  a  kid.  For  twenty-five  years  he  kept 
a  place  twice  as  big  as  England  in  order:    a  place  full  of 


8  Misalliance 

seditious  coffee-colored  heathens  and  pestilential  white 
agitators  in  the  middle  of  a  lot  of  savage  tribes.  And  yet 
he  couldnt  keep  you  in  order.  I  dont  set  up  to  be  half  the 
man  your  father  undoubtedly  is;  but,  by  George,  it's  lucky 
for  you  you  were  not  my  son.  I  dont  hold  with  my  own 
father's  views  about  corporal  punishment  being  wrong. 
It's  necessary  for  some  people;  and  I'd  have  tried  it  on  you 
until  you  first  learnt  to  howl  and  then  to  behave  yourself. 

B entley  [contemptuously]  Yes:  behavior  wouldnt  come 
naturally  to  your  son,  would  it? 

Johnny  [stung  into  sudden  violence]  Now  you  keep  a  civil 
tongue  in  your  head.  I'll  stand  none  of  your  snobbery. 
I'm  just  as  proud  of  Tarleton's  Underwear  as  you  are  of 
your  father's  title  and  his  K.C.B.,  and  all  the  rest  of  it. 
My  father  began  in  a  little  hole  of  a  shop  in  Leeds  no  bigger 
than  our  pantry  down  the  passage  there.    He — 

Bentley.  Oh  yes:  I  know.  Ive  read  it.  "The  Ro- 
mance of  Business,  or  The  Story  of  Tarleton's  Underwear. 
Please  Take  One!"  I  took  one  the  day  after  I  first  met 
Hypatia.  I  went  and  bought  half  a  dozen  unshrinkable 
vests  for  her  sake. 

Johnny.    Well:    did  they  shrink? 

Bentley.    Oh,  dont  be  a  fool. 

Johnny.  Never  mind  whether  I'm  a  fool  or  not.  Did 
they  shrink?  Thats  the  point.  Were  they  worth  the 
money? 

Bentley.  I  couldnt  wear  them:  do  you  think  my  skin's 
as  thick  as  your  customers'  hides?  I'd  as  soon  have 
dressed  myself  in  a  nutmeg  grater. 

Johnny.  Pity  your  father  didnt  give  your  thin  skin  a 
jolly  good  lacing  with  a  cane — ! 

Bentley.  Pity  you  havnt  got  more  than  one  idea!  If 
you  want  to  know,  they  did  try  that  on  me  once,  when  I 
was  a  small  kid.  A  silly  governess  did  it.  I  yelled  fit  to 
bring  down  the  house  and  went  into  convulsions  and  brain 
fever  and  that  sort  of  thing  for  three  weeks.     So  the  old 


Misalliance  9 

girl  got  the  sack;  and  serve  her  right!  After  that,  I  was 
let  do  what  I  like.  My  father  didnt  want  me  to  grow  up 
a  broken-spirited  spaniel,  which  is  your  idea  of  a  man,  I 
suppose. 

Johnny.  Jolly  good  thing  for  you  that  my  father  made 
you  come  into  the  office  and  shew  what  you  were  made  of. 
And  it  didnt  come  to  much:  let  me  tell  you  that.  When 
the  Governor  asked  me  where  I  thought  we  ought  to  put 
you,  I  said,  "Make  him  the  Office  Boy."  The  Governor 
said  you  were  too  green.    And  so  you  were. 

Bentley.  I  daresay.  So  would  you  be  pretty  green  if 
you  were  shoved  into  my  father's  set.  I  picked  up  your 
silly  business  in  a  fortnight.  Youve  been  at  it  ten  years; 
and  you  havnt  picked  it  up  yet. 

Johnny.  Dont  talk  rot,  child.  You  know  you  simply 
make  me  pity  you. 

Bentley.  "Romance  of  Business"  indeed!  The  real 
romance  of  Tarleton's  business  is  the  story  that  you  under- 
stand anything  about  it.  You  never  could  explain  any 
mortal  thing  about  it  to  me  when  I  asked  you.  "See  what 
was  done  the  last  time":  that  was  the  beginning  and  the 
end  of  your  wisdom.    Youre  nothing  but  a  turnspit. 

Johnny.   A  what! 

Bentley.  A  turnspit.  If  your  father  hadnt  made  a 
roasting  jack  for  you  to  turn,  youd  be  earning  twenty-four 
shillings  a  week  behind  a  counter. 

Johnny.  If  you  dont  take  that  back  and  apologize  for 
your  bad  manners,  I'll  give  you  as  good  a  hiding  as  ever  — 

Bentley.  Help!  Johnny's  beating  me!  Oh!  Murder! 
[He  throws  himself  on  the  ground,  uttering  piercing  yells]. 

Johnny.  Dont  be  a  fool.  Stop  that  noise,  will  you. 
I'm  not  going  to  touch  you.    Sh — sh — 

Hypatia  rushes  in  through  the  inner  door,  followed  by  Mrs 
Tarleton,  and  throws  herself  on  her  knees  by  Bentley.  Mrs 
Tarleton,  whose  knees  are  stijfer,  bends  over  him  and  tries  to 
lift  him.    Mrs  Tarleton  is  a  shrewd  and  motherly  old  lady  who 


10  Misalliance 

has  been  pretty  in  her  time,  and  is  still  very  pleasant  and  like- 
able and  unaffected.  Hypatia  is  a  typical  English  girl  of  a 
sort  never  called  typical:  that  is,  she  has  an  opaque  white 
skin,  black  hair,  large  dark  eyes  with  black  brows  and  lashes, 
curved  lips,  swift  glances  and  movements  that  flash  out  of  a 
waiting  stillness,  boundless  energy  and  audacity  held  in  leash. 

Hypatia  [pouncing  on  Bentley  with  no  very  gentle  hand] 
Bentley:  whats  the  matter?  Dont  cry  like  that:  whats 
the  use?     Whats  happened? 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Are  you  ill,  child?  [They  get  him  up]. 
There,  there,  pet!  It's  all  right:  dont  cry  [they  put  him 
into  a  chair] :  there !  there !  there !  Johnny  will  go  for  the 
doctor;  and  he'll  give  you  something  nice  to  make  it  well. 

Hypatia.    What  has  happened,  Johnny? 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Was  it  a  wasp? 

Bentley  [impatiently]    Wasp  be  dashed! 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Oh  Bunny!  that  was  a  naughty  word. 

Bentley.  Yes,  I  know:  I  beg  your  pardon.  [He  rises, 
and  extricates  himself  from  them]  Thats  all  right.  Johnny 
frightened  me.  You  know  how  easy  it  is  to  hurt  me;  and 
I'm  too  small  to  defend  myself  against  Johnny. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Johnny:  how  often  have  I  told  you 
that  you  must  not  bully  the  Little  ones.  I  thought  youd 
outgrown  all  that. 

Hypatia  [angrily]  I  do  declare,  mamma,  that  Johnny's 
brutality  makes  it  impossible  to  live  in  the  house  with  him. 

Johnny  [deeply  hurt]  It's  twenty-seven  years,  mother, 
since  you  had  that  row  with  me  for  licking  Robert  and 
giving  Hypatia  a  black  eye  because  she  bit  me.  I  prom- 
ised you  then  that  I'd  never  raise  my  hand  to  one  of  them 
again;  and  Ive  never  broken  my  word.  And  now  because 
this  young  whelp  begins  to  cry  out  before  he's  hurt,  you 
treat  me  as  if  I  were  a  brute  and  a  savage. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  No  dear,  not  a  savage;  but  you  know 
you  must  not  call  our  visitor  naughty  names. 

Bentley.    Oh,  let  him  alone — 


Misalliance  11 

Johnnt  [fiercely]  Dont  you  interfere  between  my 
mother  and  me:    d'y'  hear? 

Hypatia.  Johnny's  lost  his  temper,  mother.  We'd 
better  go.     Come,  Bentley. 

Mks  Tableton.  Yes:  that  will  be  best.  [To  Bentley] 
Johnny  doesnt  mean  any  harm,  dear:  he'll  be  himself 
presently.     Come. 

The  two  ladies  go  out  through  the  inner  door  with  Bentley, 
who  turns  at  the  door  to  grin  at  Johnny  as  he  goes  out. 

Johnny,  left  alone,  clenches  his  fists  and  grinds  his  teeth,  but 
can  find  no  relief  in  that  way  for  his  rage.  After  choking  and 
stamping  for  a  moment,  he  makes  for  the  vestibide  door.  It 
opens  before  he  reaches  it;  and  Lord  Summerhays  comes  in. 
Johnny  glares  at  him,  speechless.  Lord  Summerhays  takes 
in  the  situation,  and  quickly  takes  the  punchbowl  from  the 
sideboard  and  offers  it  to  Johnny. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Smash  it.  Dont  hesitate:  it's  an 
ugly  thing.  Smash  it:  hard.  [Johnny,  with  a  stifled  yell, 
dashes  it  in  pieces,  and  then  sits  down  and  mops  his  broio]. 
Feel  better  now?  [Johnny  nods].  I  know  only  one  person 
alive  who  could  drive  me  to  the  point  of  having  either  to 
break  china  or  commit  murder;  and  that  person  is  my  son 
Bentley.  Was  it  he?  [Johnny  nods  again,  not  yet  able  to 
speak].  As  the  car  stopped  I  heard  a  yell  which  is  only  too 
familiar  to  me.  It  generally  means  that  some  infuriated 
person  is  trying  to  thrash  Bentley.  Nobody  has  ever  suc- 
ceeded, though  almost  everybody  has  tried.  [He  seats  him- 
self comfortably  close  to  the  writing  table,  and  sets  to  work  to 
collect  the  fragments  of  the  punchbotvl  in  the  wastepaper 
basket  whilst  Johnny,  with  diminishing  difficulty,  collects 
himself].  Bentley  is  a  problem  which  I  confess  I  have 
never  been  able  to  solve.  He  was  born  to  be  a  great  success 
at  the  age  of  fifty.  Most  Englishmen  of  his  class  seem  to 
be  born  to  be  great  successes  at  the  age  of  twenty-four  at 
most.  The  domestic  problem  for  me  is  how  to  endure 
Bentley  until  he  is  fifty.     The  problem  for  the  nation  is 


12  Misalliance 

how  to  get  itself  governed  by  men  whose  growth  is  arrested 
when  they  are  little  more  than  college  lads.  Bentley 
doesnt  really  mean  to  be  offensive.  You  can  always  make 
him  cry  by  telling  him  you  dont  like  him.  Only,  he  cries 
so  loud  that  the  experiment  should  be  made  in  the  open 
air:  in  the  middle  of  Salisbury  Plain  if  possible.  He  has  a 
hard  and  penetrating  intellect  and  a  remarkable  power  of 
looking  facts  in  the  face;  but  unfortunately,  being  very 
young,  he  has  no  idea  of  how  very  little  of  that  sort  of 
thing  most  of  us  can  stand.  On  the  other  hand,  he  is- 
frightfully  sensitive  and  even  affectionate;  so  that  he 
probably  gets  as  much  as  he  gives  in  the  way  of  hurt  feel- 
ings. Youll  excuse  me  rambling  on  like  this  about  my 
son. 

Johnny  [who  has  pulled  himself  together]  You  did  it  on 
purpose.  I  wasnt  quite  myself:  I  needed  a  moment  to 
pull  round:   thank  you. 

Lord  Summerhays.    Not  at  all.    Is  your  father  at  home? 

Johnny.  No:  he's  > opening  one  of  his  free  libraries. 
Thats  another  nice  little  penny  gone.  He's  mad  on  read- 
ing. He  promised  another  free  library  last  week.  It's 
ruinous.  Itll  hit  you  as  well  as  me  when  Bunny  marries 
Hypatia.  When  all  Hypatia's  money  is  thrown  away  on 
libraries,  where  will  Bunny  come  in?  Cant  you  stop 
him? 

Lord  Summerhays.  I'm  afraid  not.  Hes  a  perfect 
whirlwind.  Indefatigable  at  public  work.  Wonderful 
man,  I  think. 

Johnny.  Oh,  public  work!  He  does  too  much  of  it. 
It's  really  a  sort  of  laziness,  getting  away  from  your  own 
serious  business  to  amuse  yourself  with  other  people's. 
Mind:  I  dont  say  there  isnt  another  side  to  it.  It  has 
its  value  as  an  advertisement.  It  makes  useful  acquaint- 
ances and  leads  to  valuable  business  connections.  But 
it  takes  his  mind  off  the  main  chance;  and  he  over- 
does it. 


Misalliance  13 

Lord  Summerhats.  The  danger  of  public  business  is 
that  it  never  ends.    A  man  may  kill  himself  at  it. 

Johnny.  Or  he  can  spend  more  on  it  than  it  brings 
him  in:  thats  how  I  look  at  it.  What  I  say  is  that  every- 
body's business  is  nobody's  business.  I  hope  I'm  not  a 
hard  man,  nor  a  narrow  man,  nor  unwilling  to  pay  reason- 
able taxes,  and  subscribe  in  reason  to  deserving  charities, 
and  even  serve  on  a  jury  in  my  turn;  and  no  man  can  say 
I  ever  refused  to  help  a  friend  out  of  a  difficulty  when  he 
was  worth  helping.  But  when  you  ask  me  to  go  beyond 
that,  I  tell  you  frankly  I  dont  see  it.  I  never  did  see  it, 
even  when  I  was  only  a  boy,  and  had  to  pretend  to  take 
in  all  the  ideas  the  Governor  fed  me  up  with.  I  didnt  see 
it;  and  I  dont  see  it. 

Lord  Summerhays.  There  is  certainly  no  business 
reason  why  you  should  take  more  than  your  share  of  the 
world's  work. 

Johnny.  So  I  say.  It's  really  a  great  encouragement  to 
me  to  find  you  agree  with  me.  For  of  course  if  nobody 
agrees  with  you,  how  are  you  to  know  that  youre  not  a 
fool? 

Lord  Summerhays.    Quite  so. 

Johnny.  I  wish  youd  talk  to  him  about  it.  It's  no  use 
my  saying  anything:  I'm  a  child  to  him  still:  I  have  no 
influence.  Besides,  you  know  how  to  handle  men.  See 
how  you  handled  me  when  I  was  making  a  fool  of  myself 
about  Bunny! 

Lord  Summerhays.    Not  at  all. 

Johnny.  Oh  yes  I  was:  I  know  I  was.  Well,  if  my 
blessed  father  had  come  in  he'd  have  told  me  to  control 
myself.     As  if  I  was  losing  my  temper  on  purpose! 

Bentley  returns,  newly  washed.  He  beams  when  he  sees  his 
father,  and  conies  affectionately  behind  him  and  pats  him  on 
the  shoulders. 

Bentley.  Hel-lo,  commander!  have  you  come?  Ive 
been  making  a  filthy  silly  ass  of  myself  here.    I'm  awfully 


14  Misalliance 

sorry,  Johnny,  old  chap:  I  beg  your  pardon.  Why  dont 
you  kick  me  when  I  go  on  like  that? 

Lord  Summerhays.  As  we  came  through  Godalming  I 
thought  I  heard  some  yelling — 

Bentley.  I  should  think  you  did.  Johnny  was  rather 
rough  on  me,  though.  He  told  me  nobody  here  liked  me; 
and  I  was  silly  enough  to  believe  him. 

Lord  Summerhays.  And  all  the  women  have  been  kiss- 
ing you  and  pitying  you  ever  since  to  stop  your  crying,  I 
suppose.     Baby! 

Bentley.  I  did  cry.  But  I  always  feel  good  after  crying : 
it  relieves  my  wretched  nerves.    I  feel  perfectly  jolly  now. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Not  at  all  ashamed  of  yourself,  for 
instance? 

Bentley.  If  I  started  being  ashamed  of  myself  I 
shouldnt  have  time  for  anything  else  all  my  life.  I  say:  I 
feel  very  fit  and  spry.  Lets  all  go  down  and  meet  the 
Grand  Cham.  [He  goes  to  the  hatstand  and  takes  down  his 
hat]. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Does  Mr  Tarleton  like  to  be  called 
the  Grand  Cham,  do  you  think,  Bentley? 

Bentley.  Well,  he  thinks  hes  too  modest  for  it.  He 
calls  himself  Plain  John.  But  you  cant  call  him  that  in 
his  own  office:  besides,  it  doesnt  suit  him:  it's  not  flam- 
boyant enough. 

Johnny.    Flam  what? 

Bentley.  Flamboyant.  Lets  go  and  meet  him.  Hes 
telephoned  from  Guildford  to  say  hes  on  the  road.  The 
dear  old  son  is  always  telephoning  or  telegraphing:  he 
thinks  hes  hustling  along  like  anything  when  hes  only 
sending  unnecessary  messages. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Thank  you:  I  should  prefer  a 
quiet  afternoon. 

Bentley.  Right  O.  I  shant  press  Johnny:  hes  had 
enough  of  me  for  one  week-end.  [He  goes  out  through  the 
pavilion  into  the  grounds]. 


Misalliance  15 

Johnny.    Not  a  bad  idea,  that. 

Lord  Summerhays.    What? 

Johnny.  Going  to  meet  the  Governor.  You  know  you 
wouldnt  think  it;  but  the  Governor  likes  Bunny  rather. 
And  Bunny  is  cultivating  it.  I  shouldnt  be  surprised  if 
he  thought  he  could  squeeze  me  out  one  of  these  days. 

Lord  Summerhays.  You  dont  say  so!  Young  rascal! 
I  want  to  consult  you  about  him,  if  you  dont  mind.  Shall 
we  stroll  over  to  the  Gibbet?  Bentley  is  too  fast  for  me  as 
a  walking  companion;   but  I  should  like  a  short  turn. 

Johnny  [rising  eagerly,  highly  flattered]  Right  you  are. 
Thatll  suit  me  down  to  the  ground.  [He  takes  a  Panama 
and  stick  from  the  hat  stand}. 

Mrs  Tarleton  and  Hypatia  come  back  just  as  the  two  men 
are  going  out.  Hypatia  salutes  Summerhays  from  a  distance 
with  an  enigmatic  lift  of  her  eyelids  in  his  direction  and  a 
demure  nod  before  she  sits  down  at  the  worktable  and  busies 
herself  with  her  needle.  Mrs  Tarleton,  hospitably  fussy,  goes 
over  to  him. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  Lord  Summerhays,  I  didnt  know 
you  were  here.     Wont  you  have  some  tea? 

Lord  Summerhays.  No,  thank  you:  I'm  not  allowed 
tea.  And  I'm  ashamed  to  say  Ive  knocked  over  your 
beautiful  punch-bowl.    You  must  let  me  replace  it. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  it  doesnt  matter:  I'm  only  too 
glad  to  be  rid  of  it.  The  shopman  told  me  it  was  in  the 
best  taste;  but  when  my  poor  old  nurse  Martha  got  catar- 
act, Bunny  said  it  was  a  merciful  provision  of  Nature  to 
prevent  her  seeing  our  china. 

Lord  Summerhays  [gravely]  That  was  exceedingly  rude 
of  Bentley,  Mrs  Tarleton.     I  hope  you  told  him  so. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  bless  you!  I  dont  care  what  he 
says;    so  long  as  he  says  it  to  me  and  not  before  visitors. 

Johnny.    We're  going  out  for  a  stroll,  mother. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  All  right:  dont  let  us  keep  you.  Never 
mind  about  that  crock:   I'll  get  the  girl  to  come  and  take 


16  Misalliance 

the  pieces  away.  [Recollecting  herself]  There!  Ive  done 
it  again! 

Johnny.    Done  what? 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Called  her  the  girl.  You  know,  Lord 
Summerhays,  its  a  funny  thing;  but  now  I'm  getting  old, 
I'm  dropping  back  into  all  the  ways  John  and  I  had  when 
we  had  barely  a  hundred  a  year.  You  should  have  known 
me  when  I  was  forty!  I  talked  like  a  duchess;  and  if 
Johnny  or  Hypatia  let  slip  a  word  that  was  like  old  times, 
I  was  down  on  them  like  anything.  And  now  I'm  begin- 
ning to  do  it  myself  at  every  turn. 

Lord  Summerhays.  There  comes  a  time  when  all  that 
seems  to  matter  so  little.  Even  queens  drop  the  mask 
when  they  reach  our  time  of  life. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Let  you  alone  for  giving  a  thing  a 
pretty  turn!  Youre  a  humbug,  you  know,  Lord  Summer- 
hays. John  doesnt  know  it;  and  Johnny  doesnt  know  it; 
but  you  and  I  know  it,  dont  we?  Now  thats  something  that 
even  you  cant  answer;  so  be  off  with  you  for  your  walk 
without  another  word. 

Lord  Summerhays  smiles;  bows;  and  goes  out  through  the 
vestibule  door,  followed  by  Johnny.  Mrs  Tarleton  sits  down 
at  the  worktable  and  takes  out  her  darning  materials  and  one 
of  her  husband's  socks.  Hypatia  is  at  the  other  side  of  the 
table,  on  her  mother's  right.     They  chat  as  they  work. 

Hypatia.  I  wonder  whether  they  laugh  at  us  when  they 
are  by  themselves! 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Who? 

Hypatia.  Bentley  and  his  father  and  all  the  toffs  in 
their  set. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  thats  only  their  way.  I  used  to 
think  that  the  aristocracy  were  a  nasty  sneering  lot,  and 
that  they  were  laughing  at  me  and  John.  Theyre  always 
giggling  and  pretending  not  to  care  much  about  anything. 
But  you  get  used  to  it:  theyre  the  same  to  one  another  and 
to  everybody.     Besides,  what  does  it  matter  what  they 


Misalliance  17 

think?  It's  far  worse  when  theyre  civil,  because  that  al- 
ways means  that  they  want  you  to  lend  them  money;  and 
you  must  never  do  that,  Hypatia,  because  they  never  pay. 
How  can  they?  They  dont  make  anything,  you  see.  Of 
course,  if  you  can  make  up  your  mind  to  regard  it  as  a 
gift,  thats  different;  but  then  they  generally  ask  you 
again;  and  you  may  as  well  say  no  first  as  last.  You 
neednt  be  afraid  of  the  aristocracy,  dear:  theyre  only 
human  creatures  like  ourselves  after  all;  and  youll  hold 
your  own  with  them  easy  enough. 

Hypatia.  Oh,  I'm  not  a  bit  afraid  of  them,  I  assure 
you. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Well,  no,  not  afraid  of  them,  exactly; 
but  youve  got  to  pick  up  their  ways.  You  know,  dear,  I 
never  quite  agreed  with  your  father's  notion  of  keeping 
clear  of  them,  and  sending  you  to  a  school  that  was  so 
expensive  that  they  couldnt  afford  to  send  their  daughters 
there;  so  that  all  the  girls  belonged  to  big  business  fami- 
lies like  ourselves.  It  takes  all  sorts  to  make  a  world ;  and 
I  wanted  you  to  see  a  little  of  all  sorts.  When  you  marry 
Bunny,  and  go  among  the  women  of  his  father's  set,  theyll 
shock  you  at  first. 

Hypatia    [incredulously]  How? 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Well,  the  things  they  talk  about. 

Hypatia.    Oh!  scandalmongering? 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh  no:  we  all  do  that:  thats  only 
human  nature.  But  you  know  theyve  no  notion  of 
decency.  I  shall  never  forget  the  first  day  I  spent  with  a 
marchioness,  two  duchesses,  and  no  end  of  Ladies  This  and 
That.  Of  course  it  was  only  a  committee:  theyd  put  me 
on  to  get  a  big  subscription  out  of  John.  I'd  never  heard 
such  talk  in  my  life.  The  things  they  mentioned!  And  it 
was  the  marchioness  that  started  it. 

Hypatia.    What  sort  of  things? 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Drainage!!  She'd  tried  three  systems 
in  her  castle;    and  she  was  going  to  do  away  with  them 


18  Misalliance 

all  and  try  another.  I  didnt  know  which  way  to  look  when 
she  began  talking  about  it:  I  thought  theyd  all  have  got 
up  and  gone  out  of  the  room.  But  not  a  bit  of  it,  if  you 
please.  They  were  all  just  as  bad  as  she.  They  all  had 
systems;  and  each  of  them  swore  by  her  own  system.  I 
sat  there  with  my  cheeks  burning  until  one  of  the  duchesses, 
thinking  I  looked  out  of  it,  I  suppose,  asked  me  what 
system  I  had.  I  said  I  was  sure  I  knew  nothing  about  such 
things,  and  hadnt  we  better  change  the  subject.  Then  the 
fat  was  in  the  fire,  I  can  tell  you.  There  was  a  regular 
terror  of  a  countess  with  an  anaerobic  system;  and  she  told 
me,  downright  brutally,  that  I'd  better  learn  something 
about  them  before  my  children  died  of  diphtheria.  That 
was  just  two  months  after  I'd  buried  poor  little  Bobby; 
and  that  was  the  very  thing  he  died  of,  poor  little  lamb! 
I  burst  out  crying:  I  couldnt  help  it.  It  was  as  good 
as  telling  me  I'd  killed  my  own  child.  I  had  to  go  away; 
but  before  I  was  out  of  the  door  one  of  the  duchesses — 
quite  a  young  woman — began  talking  about  what  sour 
milk  did  in  her  inside  and  how  she  expected  to  live  to  be 
over  a  hundred  if  she  took  it  regularly.  And  me  listening 
to  her,  that  had  never  dared  to  think  that  a  duchess  could 
have  anything  so  common  as  an  inside!  I  shouldnt  have 
minded  if  it  had  been  children's  insides:  we  have  to  talk 
about  them.  But  grown-up  people!  I  was  glad  to  get 
away  that  time. 

Hypatia.  There  was  a  physiology  and  hygiene  class 
started  at  school;  but  of  course  none  of  our  girls  were  let 
attend  it. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  If  it  had  been  an  aristocratic  school 
plenty  would  have  attended  it.  Thats  what  theyre  like: 
theyve  nasty  minds.  With  really  nice  good  women  a  thing 
is  either  decent  or  indecent;  and  if  it's  indecent,  we  just 
dont  mention  it  or  pretend  to  know  about  it;  and  theres 
an  end  of  it.  But  all  the  aristocracy  cares  about  is  whether 
it  can  get  any  good  out  of  the  thing.    Theyre  what  Johnny 


Misalliance  19 

calls  cynical-like.  And  of  course  nobody  can  say  a  word 
to  them  for  it.  Theyre  so  high  up  that  they  can  do  and 
say  what  they  like. 

Hypatia.  Well,  I  think  they  might  leave  the  drains  to 
their  husbands.  I  shouldnt  think  much  of  a  man  that  left 
such  things  to  me. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  dont  think  that,  dear,  whatever 
you  do.  I  never  let  on  about  it  to  you;  but  it's  me  that 
takes  care  of  the  drainage  here.  After  what  that  countess 
said  to  me  I  wasnt  going  to  lose  another  child  or  trust  John. 
And  I  don't  want  my  grandchildren  to  die  any  more  than 
my  children. 

Hypatia.  Do  you  think  Bentley  will  ever  be  as  big  a 
man  as  his  father?  I  dont  mean  clever:  I  mean  big  and 
strong. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Not  he.  Hes  overbred,  like  one  of 
those  expensive  little  dogs.  I  like  a  bit  of  a  mongrel  my- 
self, whether  it's  a  man  or  a  dog:  theyre  the  best  for 
everyday.  But  we  all  have  our  tastes :  whats  one  woman's 
meat  is  another  woman's  poison.  Bunny's  a  dear  little 
fellow;  but  I  never  could  have  fancied  him  for  a  husband 
when  I  was  your  age. 

Hypatia.  Yes;  but  he  has  some  brains.  Hes  not  like 
all  the  rest.     One  can't  have  everything. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  youre  quite  right,  dear:  quite 
right.  It's  a  great  thing  to  have  brains:  look  what  it's 
done  for  your  father!  Thats  the  reason  I  never  said  a  word 
when  you  jilted  poor  Jerry  Mackintosh. 

Hypatia  [excusing  herself]  I  really  couldnt  stick  it  out 
with  Jerry,  mother.  I  know  you  liked  him;  and  nobody 
can  deny  that  hes  a  splendid  animal — 

Mrs  Tarleton  [shocked]  Hypatia !  How  can  you !  The 
things  that  girls  say  nowadays! 

Hypatia.  Well,  what  else  can  you  call  him?  If  I'd 
been  deaf  or  he'd  been  dumb,  I  could  have  married  him. 
But  living  with  father,  Ive  got  accustomed  to  cleverness. 


20  Misalliance 

Jerry  would  drive  me  mad:  you  know  very  well  hes  a 
fool:  even  Johnny  thinks  him  a  fool. 

Mes  Takleton  [up  in  arms  at  once  in  defence  of  her  boy] 
Now  dont  begin  about  my  Johnny.  You  know  it  annoys 
me.  Johnny's  as  clever  as  anybody  else  in  his  own  way. 
I  dont  say  hes  as  clever  as  you  in  some  ways;  but  hes  a 
man,  at  all  events,  and  not  a  little  squit  of  a  thing  like 
your  Bunny. 

Hypatia.  Oh,  I  say  nothing  against  your  darling:  we 
all  know  Johnny's  perfection. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Dont  be  cross,  dearie.  You  let 
Johnny  alone;  and  I'll  let  Bunny  alone.  I'm  just  as  bad 
as  you.     There! 

Hypatia.  Oh,  I  dont  mind  your  saying  that  about 
Bentley.  It's  true.  He  is  a  little  squit  of  a  thing.  I  wish 
he  wasnt.  But  who  else  is  there?  Think  of  all  the  other 
chances  Ive  had!  Not  one  of  them  has  as  much  brains  in 
his  whole  body  as  Bentley  has  in  his  little  finger.  Besides, 
theyve  no  distinction.  It's  as  much  as  I  can  do  to  tell 
one  from  the  other.  They  wouldnt  even  have  money  if 
they  werent  the  sons  of  their  fathers,  like  Johnny.  Whats 
a  girl  to  do?  I  never  met  anybody  like  Bentley  before. 
He  may  be  small;  but  hes  the  best  of  the  bunch:  you 
cant  deny  that. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [with  a  sigh]  Well,  my  pet,  if  you  fancy 
him,  theres  no  more  to  be  said. 

A  pause  follows  this  remark:  the  two  women  sewing 
silently. 

Hypatia.  Mother:  do  you  think  marriage  is  as  much 
a  question  of  fancy  as  it  used  to  be  in  your  time  and 
father's? 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  it  wasnt  much  fancy  with  me, 
dear:  your  father  just  wouldnt  take  no  for  an  answer; 
and  I  was  only  too  glad  to  be  his  wife  instead  of  his  shop- 
girl. Still,  it's  curious;  but  I  had  more  choice  than  you 
in  a  way,  because,  you  see,  I  was  poor;    and  there  are  so 


Misalliance  21 

many  more  poor  men  than  rich  ones  that  I  might  have 
had  more  of  a  pick,  as  you  might  say,  if  John  hadnt 
suited  me. 

Hypatia.  I  can  imagine  all  sorts  of  men  I  could  fall  in 
love  with;  but  I  never  seem  to  meet  them.  The  real 
ones  are  too  small,  like  Bunny,  or  too  silly,  like  Jerry. 
Of  course  one  can  get  into  a  state  about  any  man:  fall 
in  love  with  him  if  you  like  to  call  it  that.  But  who  would 
risk  marrying  a  man  for  love?  I  shouldnt.  I  remember 
three  girls  at  school  who  agreed  that  the  one  man  you 
should  never  marry  was  the  man  you  were  in  love  with, 
because  it  would  make  a  perfect  slave  of  you.  Theres  a 
sort  of  instinct  against  it,  I  think,  thats  just  as  strong 
as  the  other  instinct.  One  of  them,  to  my  certain  knowl- 
edge, refused  a  man  she  was  in  love  with,  and  married 
another  who  was  in  love  with  her;  and  it  turned  out  very 
well. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Does  all  that  mean  that  youre  not  in 
love  with  Bunny? 

Hypatia.  Oh,  how  could  anybody  be  in  love  with 
Bunny?  I  like  him  to  kiss  me  just  as  I  like  a  baby  to  kiss 
me.  I'm  fond  of  him;  and  he  never  bores  me;  and  I  see 
that  hes  very  clever;  but  I'm  not  what  you  call  gone  about 
him,  if  thats  what  you  mean. 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Then  why  need  you  marry  him? 

Hypatia.  What  better  can  I  do?  I  must  marry  some- 
body, I  suppose.  Ive  realized  that  since  I  was  twenty- 
three.  I  always  used  to  take  it  as  a  matter  of  course  that 
I  should  be  married  before  I  was  twenty. 

Bentley's  Voice  [in  the  garden]  Youve  got  to  keep 
yourself  fresh:  to  look  at  these  things  with  an  open 
mind. 

John  Tarleton's  Voice.  Quite  right,  quite  right:  I 
always  say  so. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Theres  your  father,  and  Bunny  with 
him. 


22  Misalliance 

Bentley.  Keep  young.  Keep  your  eye  on  me.  Thats 
the  tip  for  you. 

Bentley  and  Mr  Tarleton  (an  immense  and  genial  veteran 
of  trade)  come  into  view  and  enter  the  pavilion. 

John  Tarleton.  You  think  youre  young,  do  you?  You 
think  I'm  old?  [energetically  shaking  off  his  motoring  coat 
and  hanging  it  up  with  his  cap]. 

Bentley  [helping  him  with  the  coat]  Of  course  youre 
old.  Look  at  your  face  and  look  at  mine.  What  you  call 
your  youth  is  nothing  but  your  levity.  Why  do  we  get  on 
so  well  together?  Because  I'm  a  young  cub  and  youre  an 
old  josser.  [He  throws  a  cushion  at  Hypatia's  feet  and  sits 
down  on  it  with  his  back  against  her  knees], 

Tarleton.  Old !  Thats  all  you  know  about  it,  my  lad. 
How  do,  Patsy!  [Hypatia  kisses  him].  How  is  my  Chicka- 
biddy? [He  kisses  Mrs  Tarleton' s  hand  and  poses  expan- 
sively in  the  middle  of  the  picture].  Look  at  me!  Look  at 
these  wrinkles,  these  gray  hairs,  this  repulsive  mask  that 
you  call  old  age!  What  is  it?  [Vehemently]  I  ask  you,  what 
is  it? 

Bentley.  Jolly  nice  and  venerable,  old  man.  Dont  be 
discouraged. 

Tarleton.  Nice?  Not  a  bit  of  it.  Venerable?  Vener- 
able be  blowed!  Read  your  Darwin,  my  boy.  Read  your 
Weismann.  [He  goes  to  the  sideboard  for  a  drink  of 
lemonade], 

Mrs  Tarleton.  For  shame,  John!  Tell  him  to  read 
his  Bible. 

Tarleton  [manipulating  the  syphon]  Whats  the  use  of 
telling  children  to  read  the  Bible  when  you  know  they 
wont.  I  was  kept  away  from  the  Bible  for  forty  years  by 
being  told  to  read  it  when  I  was  young.  Then  I  picked  it 
up  one  evening  in  a  hotel  in  Sunderland  when  I  had  left 
all  my  papers  in  the  train;  and  I  found  it  wasnt  half  bad. 
[He  drinks,  and  puts  down  the  glass  with  a  smack  of  enjoy- 
ment].    Better  than  most  halfpenny  papers,  anyhow,  if 


Misalliance  23 

only  you  could  make  people  believe  it.  [He  sits  down  by 
the  writing-table,  near  his  wife].  But  if  you  want  to  under- 
stand old  age  scientifically,  read  Darwin  and  Weismann. 
Of  course  if  you  want  to  understand  it  romantically,  read 
about  Solomon. 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Have  you  bad  tea,  John? 

Taeleton.  Yes.  Dont  interrupt  me  wben  I'm  improv- 
ing the  boy's  mind.  Where  was  I?  This  repulsive  mask — 
Yes.     [Explosively]    What  is  death? 

Mrs  Tarleton.    John! 

Hypatia.  Death  is  a  rather  unpleasant  subject, 
papa. 

Tarleton.  Not  a  bit.  Not  scientifically.  Scientifically 
it's  a  delightful  subject.  You  think  death's  natural.  Well, 
it  isnt.  You  read  Weismann.  There  wasnt  any  death  to 
start  with.  You  go  look  in  any  ditch  outside  and  youll  find 
swimming  about  there  as  fresh  as  paint  some  of  the 
identical  little  live  cells  that  Adam  christened  in  the 
Garden  of  Eden.  But  if  big  things  like  us  didnt  die,  we'd 
crowd  one  another  off  the  face  of  the  globe.  Nothing 
survived,  sir,  except  the  sort  of  people  that  had  the  sense 
and  good  manners  to  die  and  make  room  for  the  fresh 
supplies.  And  so  death  was  introduced  by  Natural  Selec- 
tion. You  get  it  out  of  your  head,  my  lad,  that  I'm  going 
to  die  because  I'm  wearing  out  or  decaying.  Theres  no 
such  thing  as  decay  to  a  vital  man.  I  shall  clear  out;  but 
I  shant  decay. 

Bentley.  And  what  about  the  wrinkles  and  the  almond 
tree  and  the  grasshopper  that  becomes  a  burden  and  the 
desire  that  fails? 

Tarleton.  Does  it?  by  George!  No,  sir:  it  spiritual- 
izes.   As  to  your  grasshopper,  I  can  carry  an  elephant. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  You  do  say  such  things,  Bunny !  What 
does  he  mean  by  the  almond  tree? 

Tarleton.  He  means  my  white  hairs:  the  repulsive 
mask.     That,  my  boy,  is  another  invention  of  Natural 


24  Misalliance 

Selection  to  disgust  young  women  with  me,  and  give  the 
lads  a  turn. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  John :  I  wont  have  it.  Thats  a  forbid- 
den subject. 

Tarleton.  They  talk  of  the  wickedness  and  vanity  of 
women  painting  their  faces  and  wearing  auburn  wigs  at 
fifty.  But  why  shouldnt  they?  Why  should  a  woman 
allow  Nature  to  put  a  false  mask  of  age  on  her  when  she 
knows  that  shes  as  young  as  ever?  Why  should  she  look 
in  the  glass  and  see  a  wrinkled  lie  when  a  touch  of  fine 
art  will  shew  her  a  glorious  truth?  The  wrinkles  are  a 
dodge  to  repel  young  men.  Suppose  she  doesnt  want  to 
repel  young  men!     Suppose  she  likes  them! 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Bunny:  take  Hypatia  out  into  the 
grounds  for  a  walk:  theres  a  good  boy.  John  has  got  one 
of  his  naughty  fits  this  evening. 

Hypatia.    Oh,  never  mind  me.     I'm  used  to  him. 

Bentley.  I'm  not.  I  never  heard  such  conversation: 
I  cant  believe  my  ears.  And  mind  you,  this  is  the  man  who 
objected  to  my  marrying  his  daughter  on  the  ground  that 
a  marriage  between  a  member  of  the  great  and  good  middle 
class  with  one  of  the  vicious  and  corrupt  aristocracy  would 
be  a  misalliance.  A  misalliance,  if  you  please!  This  is  the 
man  Ive  adopted  as  a  father! 

Tarleton.  Eh!  Whats  that?  Adopted  me  as  a 
father,  have  you? 

Bentley.  Yes.  Thats  an  idea  of  mine.  I  knew  a  chap 
named  Joey  Percival  at  Oxford  (you  know  I  was  two 
months  at  Balliol  before  I  was  sent  down  for  telling  the 
old  woman  who  was  head  of  that  silly  college  what  I  jolly 
well  thought  of  him.  He  would  have  been  glad  to  have 
me  back,  too,  at  the  end  of  six  months;  but  I  wouldnt 
go:  I  just  let  him  want;  and  serve  him  right!)  Well,  Joey 
was  a  most  awfully  clever  fellow,  and  so  nice!  I  asked 
him  what  made  such  a  difference  between  him  and  all  the 
other  pups — they  were  pups,  if  you  like.     He  told  me  it 


Misalliance  25 

was  very  simple:  they  had  only  one  father  apiece;  and 
he  had  three. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Dont  talk  nonsense,  child.  How  could 
that  be? 

Bentley.    Oh,  very  simple.     His  father — 

Tarleton.    Which  father? 

Bentley.  The  first  one:  the  regulation  natural  chap. 
He  kept  a  tame  philosopher  in  the  house:  a  sort  of  Coler- 
idge or  Herbert  Spencer  kind  of  card,  you  know.  That  was 
the  second  father.  Then  his  mother  was  an  Italian  prin- 
cess; and  she  had  an  Italian  priest  always  about.  He  was 
supposed  to  take  charge  of  her  conscience;  but  from  what 
I  could  make  out,  she  jolly  well  took  charge  of  his.  The 
whole  three  of  them  took  charge  of  Joey's  conscience.  He 
used  to  hear  them  arguing  like  mad  about  everything. 
You  see,  the  philosopher  was  a  freethinker,  and  always 
believed  the  latest  thing.  The  priest  didnt  believe  any- 
thing, because  it  was  sure  to  get  him  into  trouble  with 
someone  or  another.  And  the  natural  father  kept  an  open 
mind  and  believed  whatever  paid  him  best.  Between  the 
lot  of  them  Joey  got  cultivated  no  end.  He  said  if  he 
could  only  have  had  three  mothers  as  well,  he'd  have 
backed  himself  against  Napoleon. 

Tarleton  [impressed]  Thats  an  idea.  Thats  a  most 
interesting  idea:    a  most  important  idea. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  You  always  were  one  for  ideas, 
John. 

Tarleton.  Youre  right,  Chickabiddy.  What  do  I  tell 
Johnny  when  he  brags  about  Tarleton's  Underwear?  It's 
not  the  underwear.  The  underwear  be  hanged!  Anybody 
can  make  underwear.  Anybody  can  sell  underwear. 
Tarleton's  Ideas:  thats  whats  done  it.  Ive  often  thought 
of  putting  that  up  over  the  shop. 

Bentley.  Take  me  into  partnership  when  you  do,  old 
man.  I'm  wasted  on  the  underwear;  but  I  shall  come  in 
strong  on  the  ideas. 


26  Misalliance 

Taeleton.  You  be  a  good  boy;  and  perhaps  I 
will. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [scenting  a  plot  against  her  beloved  Johnny] 
Now,  John:    you  promised — 

Tarleton.  Yes,  yes.  All  right,  Chickabiddy:  dont 
fuss.  Your  precious  Johnny  shant  be  interfered  with. 
[Bouncing  up,  too  energetic  to  sit  still]  But  I'm  getting  sick 
of  that  old  shop.  Thirty-five  years  Ive  had  of  it:  same 
blessed  old  stairs  to  go  up  and  down  every  day:  same  old 
lot:  same  old  game:  sorry  I  ever  started  it  now.  I'll 
chuck  it  and  try  something  else:  something  that  will  give 
a  scope  to  all  my  faculties. 

Hypatia.  Theres  money  in  underwear:  theres  none  in 
wild-cat  ideas. 

Tarleton.  Theres  money  in  me,  madam,  no  matter 
what  I  go  into. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Dont  boast,  John.  Dont  tempt  Provi- 
dence. 

Tarleton.  Rats!  You  dont  understand  Providence. 
Providence  likes  to  be  tempted.  Thats  the  secret  of  the 
successful  man.  Read  Browning.  Natural  theology  on  an 
island,  eh?  Caliban  was  afraid  to  tempt  Providence:  that 
was  why  he  was  never  able  to  get  even  with  Prospero. 
What  did  Prospero  do?  Prospero  didnt  even  tempt 
Providence:  he  was  Providence.  Thats  one  of  Tarleton's 
ideas;    and  dont  you  forget  it. 

Bentley.    You  are  full  of  beef  today,  old  man. 

Tarleton.  Beef  be  blowed!  Joy  of  life.  Read  Ibsen. 
[He  goes  into  the  pavilion  to  relieve  his  restlessness,  and  stares 
out  with  his  hands  thrust  deep  in  his  pockets]. 

Hypatia  [thoughtful]  Bentley:  couldnt  you  invite  your 
friend  Mr  Percival  down  here? 

Bentley.  Not  if  I  know  it.  Youd  throw  me  over  the 
moment  you  set  eyes  on  him. 

Mrs  Tarleton.   Oh,  Bunny!    For  shame! 

Bentley.    Well,  who'd  marry  me,  dyou  suppose,  if  they 


Misalliance  27 

could  get  my  brains  with  a  full-sized  body?  No,  thank 
you.  I  shall  take  jolly  good  care  to  keep  Joey  out  of  this 
until  Hypatia  is  past  praying  for. 

Johnny  and  Lord  Summerhays  return  through  the  pavilion 
from  their  stroll. 

Tarleton.  Welcome !  welcome !  Why  have  you  stayed 
away  so  long? 

Lord  Summerhays  [shaking  hands]  Yes :  I  should  have 
come  sooner.  But  I'm  still  rather  lost  in  England.  [Johnny 
takes  his  hat  and  hangs  it  up  beside  his  own].  Thank  you. 
[Johnny  returns  to  his  swing  and  his  novel.  Lord  Summer- 
hays comes  to  the  writing  table].  The  fact  is  that  as  Ive 
nothing  to  do,  I  never  have  time  to  go  anywhere.  [He  sits 
down  next  Mrs   Tarleton]. 

Tarleton  [following  him  and  sitting  down  on  his  left] 
Paradox,  paradox.  Good.  Paradoxes  are  the  only  truths. 
Read  Chesterton.  But  theres  lots  for  you  to  do  here.  You 
have  a  genius  for  government.  You  learnt  your  job  out 
there  in  Jinghiskahn.  Well,  we  want  to  be  governed  here 
in  England.     Govern  us. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Ah  yes,  my  friend;  but  in  Jing- 
hiskahn you  have  to  govern  the  right  way.  If  you  dont, 
you  go  under  and  come  home.  Here  everything  has  to  be 
done  the  wrong  way,  to  suit  governors  who  understand 
nothing  but  partridge  shooting  (our  English  native  princes, 
in  fact)  and  voters  who  dont  know  what  theyre  voting 
about.  I  dont  understand  these  democratic  games;  and 
I'm  afraid  I'm  too  old  to  learn.  What  can  I  do  but  sit  in 
the  window  of  my  club,  which  consists  mostly  of  retired 
Indian  Civil  servants?  We  look  on  at  the  muddle  and  the 
folly  and  amateurishness;  and  we  ask  each  other  where  a 
single  fortnight  of  it  would  have  landed  us. 

Tarleton.  Very  true.  Still,  Democracy's  all  right, 
you  know.     Read  Mill.     Read  Jefferson. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Yes.  Democracy  reads  well;  but 
it  doesnt  act  well,  like  some  people's  plays.     No,  no,  my 


28  Misalliance 

friend  Tarleton:  to  make  Democracy  work,  you  need  an 
aristocratic  democracy.  To  make  Aristocracy  work,  you 
need  a  democratic  aristocracy.  Youve  got  neither;  and 
theres  an  end  of  it. 

Tarleton.  Still,  you  know,  the  superman  may  come. 
The  superman's  an  idea.  I  believe  in  ideas.  Read  Whats- 
hisname. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Reading  is  a  dangerous  amusement, 
Tarleton.  I  wish  I  could  persuade  your  free  library 
people  of  that. 

Tarleton.    Why,  man,  it's  the  beginning  of  education. 

Lord  Summerhays.  On  the  contrary,  it's  the  end  of  it. 
How  can  you  dare  teach  a  man  to  read  until  youve  taught 
him  everything  else  first? 

Johnny  [intercepting  his  father's  reply  by  coming  out  of 
the  swing  and  talcing  the  floor]  Leave  it  at  that.  Thats 
good  sense.     Anybody  on  for  a  game  of  tennis? 

Bentley.  Oh,  lets  have  some  more  improving  conver- 
sation.    Wouldnt  you  rather,  Johnny? 

Johnny.    If  you  ask  me,  no. 

Tarleton.  Johnny:  you  dont  cultivate  your  mind. 
You  dont  read. 

Johnny  [coming  between  his  mother  and  Lord  Summer- 
hays, book  in  hand]  Yes  I  do.  I  bet  you  what  you  like 
that,  page  for  page,  I  read  more  than  you,  though  I  dont 
talk  about  it  so  much.  Only,  I  dont  read  the  same  books. 
I  like  a  book  with  a  plot  in  it.  You  like  a  book  with  noth- 
ing in  it  but  some  idea  that  the  chap  that  writes  it  keeps 
worrying,  like  a  cat  chasing  its  own  tail.  I  can  stand  a 
little  of  it,  just  as  I  can  stand  watching  the  cat  for  two 
minutes,  say,  when  Ive  nothing  better  to  do.  But  a  man 
soon  gets  fed  up  with  that  sort  of  thing.  The  fact  is,  you 
look  on  an  author  as  a  sort  of  god.  /  look  on  him  as  a  man 
that  I  pay  to  do  a  certain  thing  for  me.  I  pay  him  to 
amuse  me  and  to  take  me  out  of  myself  and  make  me 
forget. 


Misalliance  29 

Tarleton.  No.  Wrong  principle.  You  want  to  re- 
member.    Read  Kipling.     "Lest  we  forget." 

Johnny.  If  Kipling  wants  to  remember,  let  him  re- 
member. If  he  had  to  run  Tarleton's  Underwear,  he'd  be 
jolly  glad  to  forget.  As  he  has  a  much  softer  job,  and 
wants  to  keep  himself  before  the  public,  his  cry  is,  "  Dont 
you  forget  the  sort  of  things  I'm  rather  clever  at  writing 
about."  Well,  I  dont  blame  him:  it's  his  business:  I 
should  do  the  same  in  his  place.  But  what  he  wants  and 
what  I  want  are  two  different  things.  I  want  to  forget; 
and  I  pay  another  man  to  make  me  forget.  If  I  buy  a 
book  or  go  to  the  theatre,  I  want  to  forget  the  shop  and 
forget  myself  from  the  moment  I  go  in  to  the  moment  I 
come  out.  Thats  what  I  pay  my  money  for.  And  if  I 
find  that  the  author's  simply  getting  at  me  the  whole  time, 
I  consider  that  hes  obtained  my  money  under  false  pre- 
tences. I'm  not  a  morbid  crank:  I'm  a  natural  man;  and, 
as  such,  I  dont  like  being  got  at.  If  a  man  in  my  employ- 
ment did  it,  I  should  sack  him.  If  a  member  of  my  club 
did  it,  I  should  cut  him.  If  he  went  too  far  with  it,  I  should 
bring  his  conduct  before  the  committee.  I  might  even 
punch  his  head,  if  it  came  to  that.  Well,  who  and  what  is 
an  author  that  he  should  be  privileged  to  take  liberties 
that  are  not  allowed  to  other  men? 

Mrs  Tarleton.  You  see,  John!  What  have  I  always 
told  you?  Johnny  has  as  much  to  say  for  himself  as  any- 
body when  he  likes. 

Johnny.  I'm  no  fool,  mother,  whatever  some  people 
may  fancy.  I  dont  set  up  to  have  as  many  ideas  as  the 
Governor;  but  what  ideas  I  have  are  consecutive,  at  all 
events.     I  can  think  as  well  as  talk. 

Bentley  [to  Tarleton,  chuckling]  Had  you  there,  old 
man,  hadnt  he?  You  are  rather  all  over  the  shop  with 
your  ideas,  aint  you? 

Johnny  [handsomely]  I'm  not  saying  anything  against 
you,  Governor.     But  I  do  say  that  the  time  has  come  for 


30  Misalliance 

sane,  healthy,  unpretending  men  like  me  to  make  a  stand 
against  this  conspiracy  of  the  writing  and  talking  and 
artistic  lot  to  put  us  in  the  back  row.  It  isnt  a  fact  that 
we're  inferior  to  them:  it's  a  put-up  job;  and  it's  they 
that  have  put  the  job  up.  It's  we  that  run  the  country  for 
them;  and  all  the  thanks  we  get  is  to  be  told  we're  Philis- 
tines and  vulgar  tradesmen  and  sordid  city  men  and  so 
forth,  and  that  theyre  all  angels  of  light  and  leading.  The 
time  has  come  to  assert  ourselves  and  put  a  stop  to  their 
stuck-up  nonsense.  Perhaps  if  we  had  nothing  better  to 
do  than  talking  or  writing,  we  could  do  it  better  than  they. 
Anyhow,  theyre  the  failures  and  refuse  of  business  (hardly 
a  man  of  them  that  didnt  begin  in  an  office)  and  we're  the 
successes  of  it.  Thank  God  I  havnt  failed  yet  at  anything; 
and  I  dont  believe  I  should  fail  at  literature  if  it  would  pay 
me  to  turn  my  hand  to  it. 

Bentley.    Hear,  hear! 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Fancy  you  writing  a  book,  Johnny! 
Do  you  think  he  could,  Lord  Summerhays? 

Lord  Summerhays.  Why  not?  As  a  matter  of  fact  all 
the  really  prosperous  authors  I  have  met  since  my  return 
to  England  have  been  very  like  him. 

Tarleton  [again  impressed]  Thats  an  idea.  Thats  a 
new  idea.  I  believe  I  ought  to  have  made  Johnny  an 
author.  Ive  never  said  so  before  for  fear  of  hurting  his 
feelings,  because,  after  all,  the  lad  cant  help  it;  but 
Ive  never  thought  Johnny  worth  tuppence  as  a  man  of 
business. 

Johnny  [sarcastic]  Oh!  You  think  youve  always 
kept  that  to  yourself,  do  you,  Governor?  I  know  your 
opinion  of  me  as  well  as  you  know  it  yourself.  It  takes 
one  man  of  business  to  appreciate  another;  and  you  arnt, 
and  you  never  have  been,  a  real  man  of  business.  I 
know  where  Tarleton's  would  have  been  three  of  four 
times  if  it  hadnt  been  for  me.  [With  a  snort  and  a  nod  to 
emphasize  the  implied  warning,  he  retreats  to  the   Turkish 


Misalliance  31 

hath,  and  lolls  against  it  with  an  air  of  good-humoured 
indifference]. 

Takleton.  Well,  who  denies  it?  Youre  quite  right, 
my  boy.  I  don't  mind  confessing  to  you  all  that  the  cir- 
cumstances that  condemned  me  to  keep  a  shop  are  the 
biggest  tragedy  in  modern  life.  I  ought  to  have  been  a 
writer.  I'm  essentially  a  man  of  ideas.  When  I  was  a 
young  man  I  sometimes  used  to  pray  that  I  might  fail,  so 
that  I  should  be  justified  in  giving  up  business  and  doing 
something:  something  first-class.  But  it  was  no  good:  I 
couldnt  fail.  I  said  to  myself  that  if  I  could  only  once  go 
to  my  Chickabiddy  here  and  shew  her  a  chartered  ac- 
countant's statement  proving  that  I'd  made  £20  less  than 
last  year,  I  could  ask  her  to  let  me  chance  Johnny's  and 
Hypatia's  future  by  going  into  literature.  But  it  was  no 
good.  First  it  was  £250  more  than  last  year.  Then  it  was 
£700.  Then  it  was  £2000.  Then  I  saw  it  was  no  use:  Pro- 
metheus was  chained  to  his  rock:  read  Shelley:  read 
Mrs  Browning.  Well,  well,  it  was  not  to  be.  [He  rises 
solemnly].  Lord  Summerhays:  I  ask  you  to  excuse  me  for 
a  few  moments.  There  are  times  when  a  man  needs  to 
meditate  in  solitude  on  his  destiny.  A  chord  is  touched; 
and  he  sees  the  drama  of  his  life  as  a  spectator  sees  a  play. 
Laugh  if  you  feel  inclined:  no  man  sees  the  comic  side  of 
it  more  than  I.  In  the  theatre  of  life  everyone  may  be 
amused  except  the  actor.  [Brightening]  Theres  an  idea 
in  this:  an  idea  for  a  picture.  What  a  pity  young  Bentley 
is  not  a  painter!  Tarleton  meditating  on  his  destiny.  Not 
in  a  toga.  Not  in  the  trappings  of  the  tragedian  or  the 
philosopher.  In  plain  coat  and  trousers:  a  man  like  any 
other  man.  And  beneath  that  coat  and  trousers  a  human 
soul.  Tarleton's  Underwear!  [He  goes  out  gravely  into  the 
vestibule]. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [fondly]  I  suppose  it's  a  wife's  partiality, 
Lord  Summerhays;  but  I  do  think  John  is  really  great. 
I'm  sure  he  was  meant  to  be  a  king.     My  father  looked 


32  Misalliance 

down  on  John,  because  he  was  a  rate  collector,  and  John 
kept  a  shop.  It  hurt  his  pride  to  have  to  borrow  money  so 
often  from  John;  and  he  used  to  console  himself  by  say- 
ing, "After  all,  he's  only  a  linendraper."  But  at  last  one 
day  he  said  to  me,  "John  is  a  king." 

Bentley.    How  much  did  he  borrow  on  that  occasion? 

Lokd  Summekhays  [sharply]    Bentley! 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  dont  scold  the  child:  he'd  have  to 
say  something  like  that  if  it  was  to  be  his  last  word  on 
earth.  Besides,  hes  quite  right:  my  poor  father  had 
asked  for  his  usual  five  pounds;  and  John  gave  him  a 
hundred  in  his  big  way.    Just  like  a  king. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Not  at  all.  I  had  five  kings  to 
manage  in  Jinghiskahn;  and  I  think  you  do  your  husband 
some  injustice,  Mrs  Tarleton.  They  pretended  to  like  me 
because  I  kept  their  brothers  from  murdering  them;  but 
I  didnt  like  them.    And  I  like  Tarleton. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Everybody  does.  I  really  must  go  and 
make  the  cook  do  him  a  Welsh  rabbit.  He  expects  one  on 
special  occasions.  [She  goes  to  the  inner  door].  Johnny: 
when  he  comes  back  ask  him  where  we're  to  put  that  new 
Turkish  bath.    Turkish  baths  are  his  latest.    [She  goes  out], 

Johnny  [coming  forward  again]  Now  that  the  Governor 
has  given  himself  away,  and  the  old  lady's  gone,  I'll  tell 
you  something,  Lord  Summerhays.  If  you  study  men 
whove  made  an  enormous  pile  in  business  without  being 
keen  on  money,  youll  find  that  they  all  have  a  slate  off. 
The  Governor's  a  wonderful  man;  but  hes  not  quite  all 
there,  you  know.  If  you  notice,  hes  different  from  me;  and 
whatever  my  failings  may  be,  I'm  a  sane  man.  Erratic: 
thats  what  he  is.  And  the  danger  is  that  some  day  he'll 
give  the  whole  show  away. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Giving  the  show  away  is  a  method 
like  any  other  method.  Keeping  it  to  yourself  is  only 
another  method.     I  should  keep  an  open  mind  about  it. 

Johnny.    Has  it  ever  occurred  to  you  that  a  man  with 


Misalliance  33 

an  open  mind  must  be  a  bit  of  a  scoundrel?  If  you  ask  me, 
I  like  a  man  who  makes  up  his  mind  once  for  all  as  to 
whats  right  and  whats  wrong  and  then  sticks  to  it.  At  all 
events  you  know  where  to  have  him. 

Lord  Summerhays.    That  may  not  be  his  object. 

Bentley.    He  may  want  to  have  you,  old  chap. 

Johnny.  Well,  let  him.  If  a  member  of  my  club  wants 
to  steal  my  umbrella,  he  knows  where  to  find  it.  If  a  man 
put  up  for  the  club  who  had  an  open  mind  on  the  subject 
of  property  in  umbrellas,  I  should  blackball  him.  An  open 
mind  is  all  very  well  in  clever  talky-talky;  but  in  conduct 
and  in  business  give  me  solid  ground. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Yes:  the  quicksands  make  life 
difficult.  Still,  there  they  are.  It's  no  use  pretending 
theyre  rocks. 

Johnny.  I  dont  know.  You  can  draw  a  line  and  make 
other  chaps  toe  it.     Thats  what  I  call  morality. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Very  true.  But  you  dont  make 
any  progress  when  youre  toeing  a  line. 

Hypatia  [suddenly,  as  if  she  could  bear  no  more  of  it] 
Bentley:  do  go  and  play  tennis  with  Johnny.  You  must 
take  exercise. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Do,  my  boy,  do.  [To  Johnny] 
Take  him  out  and  make  him  skip  about. 

Bentley  [rising  reluctantly]  I  promised  you  two  inches 
more  round  my  chest  this  summer.  I  tried  exercises  with 
an  indiarubber  expander;  but  I  wasnt  strong  enough:  in- 
stead of  my  expanding  it,  it  crumpled  me  up.  Come 
along,  Johnny. 

Johnny.  Do  you  no  end  of  good,  young  chap.  [He  goes 
out  with  Bentley  through  the  pavilion]. 

Hypatia  throws  aside  her  work  with  an  enormous  sigh  of 
relief. 

Lord  Summerhays.    At  last! 

Hypatia.  At  last.  Oh,  if  I  might  only  have  a  holiday  in 
an  asylum  for  the  dumb.    How  I  envy  the  animals!    They 


34  Misalliance 

cant  talk.  If  Johnny  could  only  put  back  his  ears  or  wag 
his  tail  instead  of  laying  down  the  law,  how  much  better 
it  would  be!  We  should  know  when  he  was  cross  and  when 
he  was  pleased;  and  thats  all  we  know  now,  with  all  his 
talk.  It  never  stops :  talk,  talk,  talk,  talk.  Thats  my  life. 
All  the  day  I  listen  to  mamma  talking;  at  dinner  I  listen  to 
papa  talking;  and  when  papa  stops  for  breath  I  listen  to 
Johnny  talking. 

Lord  Summerhays.  You  make  me  feel  very  guilty.  I 
talk  too,  I'm  afraid. 

Hypatia.  Oh,  I  dont  mind  that,  because  your  talk 
is  a  novelty.  But  it  must  have  been  dreadful  for  your 
daughters. 

Lord  Summerhays.   I  suppose  so. 

Hypatia.  If  parents  would  only  realize  how  they  bore 
their  children!  Three  or  four  times  in  the  last  half  hour 
Ive  been  on  the  point  of  screaming. 

Lord  Summerhays.    Were  we  very  dull? 

Hypatia.  Not  at  all:  you  were  very  clever.  Thats 
whats  so  hard  to  bear,  because  it  makes  it  so  difficult  to 
avoid  listening.  You  see,  I'm  young;  and  I  do  so  want 
something  to  happen.  My  mother  tells  me  that  when  I'm 
her  age,  I  shall  be  only  too  glad  that  nothing's  happened; 
but  I'm  not  her  age;  so  what  good  is  that  to  me?  Theres 
my  father  in  the  garden,  meditating  on  his  destiny.  All 
very  well  for  him:  hes  had  a  destiny  to  meditate  on;  but  I 
havnt  had  any  destiny  yet.  Everything's  happened  to  him: 
nothing's  happened  to  me.  Thats  why  this  unending  talk 
is  so  maddeningly  uninteresting  to  me. 

Lord  Summerhays.  It  would  be  worse  if  we  sat  in 
silence. 

Hypatia.  No  it  wouldnt.  If  you  all  sat  in  silence,  as  if 
you  were  waiting  for  something  to  happen,  then  there 
would  be  hope  even  if  nothing  did  happen.  But  this 
eternal  cackle,  cackle,  cackle  about  things  in  general  is 
only  fit  for  old,  old,  OLD  people.     I  suppose  it  means 


Misalliance  35 

something  to  them:  theyve  had  their  fling.  All  I  listen 
for  is  some  sign  of  it  ending  in  something;  but  just  when 
it  seems  to  be  coming  to  a  point,  Johnny  or  papa  just  starts 
another  hare;  and  it  all  begins  over  again;  and  I  realize 
that  it's  never  going  to  lead  anywhere  and  never  going  to 
stop.  Thats  when  I  want  to  scream.  I  wonder  how  you 
can  stand  it. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Well,  I'm  old  and  garrulous  myself, 
you  see.  Besides,  I'm  not  here  of  my  own  free  will, 
exactly.     I  came  because  you  ordered  me  to  come. 

Hypatia.    Didnt  you  want  to  come? 

Lord  Summerhays.  My  dear:  after  thirty  years  of 
managing  other  people's  business,  men  lose  the  habit  of 
considering  what  they  want  or  dont  want. 

Hypatia.  Oh,  dont  begin  to  talk  about  what  men  do, 
and  about  thirty  years  experience.  If  you  cant  get  off  that 
subject,  youd  better  send  for  Johnny  and  papa  and  begin 
it  all  over  again. 

Lord  Summerhays.    I'm  sorry.     I  beg  your  pardon. 

Hypatia.    I  asked  you,  didnt  you  want  to  come? 

Lord  Summerhays.  I  did  not  stop  to  consider  whether 
I  wanted  or  not,  because  when  I  read  your  letter  I  knew 
I  had  to  come. 

Hypatia.    Why? 

Lord  Summerhays.  Oh  come,  Miss  Tarleton!  Really, 
really!  Dont  force  me  to  call  you  a  blackmailer  to  your 
face.  You  have  me  in  your  power;  and  I  do  what  you 
tell  me  very  obediently.  Dont  ask  me  to  pretend  I  do  it 
of  my  own  free  will. 

Hypatia.  I  dont  know  what  a  blackmailer  is.  I  havnt 
even  that  much  experience. 

Lord  Summerhays.  A  blackmailer,  my  dear  young 
lady,  is  a  person  who  knows  a  disgraceful  secret  in  the  life 
of  another  person,  and  extorts  money  from  that  other 
person  by  threatening  to  make  his  secret  public  unless  the 
money  is  paid. 


36  Misalliance 

Htpatia.    I  havnt  asked  you  for  money. 

Lord  Summerhays.  No;  but  you  asked  me  to  come 
down  here  and  talk  to  you;  and  you  mentioned  casually 
that  if  I  didnt  youd  have  nobody  to  talk  about  me  to  but 
Bentley.     That  was  a  threat,  was  it  not? 

Hypatia.    Well,  I  wanted  you  to  come. 

Lord  Summerhays.  In  spite  of  my  age  and  my  unfor- 
tunate talkativeness? 

Hypatia.  I  like  talking  to  you.  I  can  let  myself  go 
with  you.  I  can  say  things  to  you  I  cant  say  to  other 
people. 

Lord  Summerhays.    I  wonder  why? 

Hypatia.  Well,  you  are  the  only  really  clever,  grown- 
up, high-class,  experienced  man  I  know  who  has  given 
himself  away  to  me  by  making  an  utter  fool  of  himself 
with  me.  You  cant  wrap  yourself  up  in  your  toga  after 
that.    You  cant  give  yourself  airs  with  me. 

Lord  Summerhays.  You  mean  you  can  tell  Bentley 
about  me  if  I  do. 

Hypatia.  Even  if  there  wasnt  any  Bentley:  even  if  you 
didnt  care  (and  I  really  dont  see  why  you  should  care  so 
much)  still,  we  never  could  be  on  conventional  terms  with 
one  another  again.  Besides,  Ive  got  a  feeling  for  you:  al- 
most a  ghastly  sort  of  love  for  you. 

Lord  Summerhays  [shrinking]   I  beg  you — no,  please. 

Hypatia.  Oh,  it's  nothing  at  all  flattering:  and,  of 
course,  nothing  wrong,  as  I  suppose  youd  call  it. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Please  believe  that  I  know  that. 
When  men  of  my  age 

Hypatia  [impatiently]  Oh,  do  talk  about  yourself  when 
you  mean  yourself,  and  not  about  men  of  your  age. 

Lord  Summerhays.  I'll  put  it  as  bluntly  as  I  can. 
When,  as  you  say,  I  made  an  utter  fool  of  myself,  believe 
me,  I  made  a  poetic  fool  of  myself.  I  was  seduced,  not  by 
appetites  which,  thank  Heaven,  Ive  long  outlived:  not 
even  by  the  desire  of  second  childhood  for  a  child  com- 


Misalliance  37 

panion,  but  by  the  innocent  impulse  to  place  the  delicacy 
and  wisdom  and  spirituality  of  my  age  at  the  affectionate 
service  of  your  youth  for  a  few  years,  at  the  end  of  which 
you  would  be  a  grown,  strong,  formed — widow.  Alas,  my 
dear,  the  delicacy  of  age  reckoned,  as  usual,  without  the 
derision  and  cruelty  of  youth.  You  told  me  that  you 
didnt  want  to  be  an  old  man's  nurse,  and  that  you  didnt 
want  to  have  undersized  children  like  Bentley.  It  served 
me  right:  I  dont  reproach  you:  I  was  an  old  fool.  But 
how  you  can  imagine,  after  that,  that  I  can  suspect  you  of 
the  smallest  feeling  for  me  except  the  inevitable  feeling  of 
early  youth  for  late  age,  or  imagine  that  I  have  any  feeling 
for  you  except  one  of  shrinking  humiliation,  I  cant 
understand. 

Hypatia.  I  dont  blame  you  for  falling  in  love  with  me. 
I  shall  be  grateful  to  you  all  my  life  for  it,  because  that 
was  the  first  time  that  anything  really  interesting  happened 
to  me. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Do  you  mean  to  tell  me  that  noth- 
ing of  that  kind  had  ever  happened  before?  that  no  man 
had  ever 

Hypatia.  Oh,  lots.  Thats  part  of  the  routine  of  life 
here:  the  very  dullest  part  of  it.  The  young  man  who 
comes  a-courting  is  as  familiar  an  incident  in  my  life  as 
coffee  for  breakfast.  Of  course,  hes  too  much  of  a  gentle- 
man to  misbehave  himself;  and  I'm  too  much  of  a  lady  to 
let  him;  and  hes  shy  and  sheepish;  and  I'm  correct  and 
self-possessed;  and  at  last,  when  I  can  bear  it  no  longer, 
I  either  frighten  him  off,  or  give  him  a  chance  of  propos- 
ing, just  to  see  how  he'll  do  it,  and  refuse  him  because  he 
does  it  in  the  same  silly  way  as  all  the  rest.  You  dont  call 
that  an  event  in  one's  life,  do  you?  With  you  it  was  dif- 
ferent. I  should  as  soon  have  expected  the  North  Pole  to 
fall  in  love  with  me  as  you.  You  know  I'm  only  a  linen- 
draper's  daughter  when  all's  said.  I  was  afraid  of  you: 
you,  a  great  man!    a  lord!    and  older  than  my  father. 


38  Misalliance 

And  then,  what  a  situation  it  was!  Just  think  of  it!  I  was 
engaged  to  your  son;  and  you  knew  nothing  about  it. 
He  was  afraid  to  tell  you:  he  brought  you  down  here  be- 
cause he  thought  if  he  could  throw  us  together  I  could  get 
round  you  because  I  was  such  a  ripping  girl.  We  arranged 
it  all:  he  and  I.  We  got  Papa  and  Mamma  and  Johnny 
out  of  the  way  splendidly;  and  then  Bentley  took  himself 
off,  and  left  us — you  and  me! — to  take  a  walk  through  the 
heather  and  admire  the  scenery  of  Hindhead.  You  never 
dreamt  that  it  was  all  a  plan :  that  what  made  me  so  nice 
was  the  way  I  was  playing  up  to  my  destiny  as  the  sweet 
girl  that  was  to  make  your  boy  happy.  And  then!  and 
then!     [She  rises  to  dance  and  clap  her  hands  in  her  glee]. 

Lord  Summerhays  [shuddering]  Stop,  stop.  Can  no 
woman  understand  a  man's  delicacy? 

Hypatia  [revelling  in  the  recollection]  And  then — ha,  ha ! 
— you  proposed.     You!    A  father!     For  your  son's  girl! 

Lord  Summerhays.  Stop,  I  tell  you.  Dont  profane 
what  you  dont  understand. 

Hypatia.  That  was  something  happening  at  last  with  a 
vengeance.  It  was  splendid.  It  was  my  first  peep  behind 
the  scenes.  If  I'd  been  seventeen  I  should  have  fallen  in 
love  with  you.  Even  as  it  is,  I  feel  quite  differently 
towards  you  from  what  I  do  towards  other  old  men.  So 
[offering  her  hand]  you  may  kiss  my  hand  if  that  will  be 
any  fun  for  you. 

Lord  Summerhays  [rising  and  recoiling  to  the  table, 
deeply  revolted]  No,  no,  no.  How  dare  you?  [She  laughs 
7nischievously].  How  callous  youth  is!  How  coarse!  How 
cynical!     How  ruthlessly  cruel! 

Hypatia.  Stuff!  It's  only  that  youre  tired  of  a  great 
many  things  Ive  never  tried. 

Lord  Summerhays.  It's  not  alone  that.  Ive  not  for- 
gotten the  brutality  of  my  own  boyhood.  But  do  try  to 
learn,  glorious  young  beast  that  you  are,  that  age  is  squeam- 
ish, sentimental,  fastidious.     If  you  cant  understand  my 


Misalliance  39 

holier  feelings,  at  least  you  know  the  bodily  infirmities  of 
the  old.  You  know  that  I  darent  eat  all  the  rich  things  you 
gobble  up  at  every  meal;  that  I  cant  bear  the  noise  and 
racket  and  clatter  that  affect  you  no  more  than  they  affect 
a  stone.  Well,  my  soul  is  like  that  too.  Spare  it:  be 
gentle  with  it  [he  involuntarily  puts  out  his  hands  to  plead: 
she  takes  them  with  a  laugh].  If  you  could  possibly  think 
of  me  as  half  an  angel  and  half  an  invalid,  we  should  get 
on  much  better  together. 

Hypatia.  We  get  on  very  well,  I  think.  Nobody  else 
ever  called  me  a  glorious  young  beast.  I  like  that.  Glo- 
rious young  beast  expresses  exactly  what  I  like  to  be. 

Lokd  Summerhays  [extricating  his  hands  and  sitting 
down]  Where  on  earth  did  you  get  these  morbid  tastes? 
You  seem  to  have  been  well  brought  up  in  a  normal, 
healthy,  respectable,  middle-class  family.  Yet  you  go  on 
like  the  most  unwholesome  product  of  the  rankest  Bohe- 
mianism. 

Hypatia.    Thats  just  it.    I'm  fed  up  with 

Lord  Summerhays.    Horrible  expression.     Dont. 

Hypatia.  Oh,  I  daresay  it's  vulgar;  but  theres  no  other 
word  for  it.  I'm  fed  up  with  nice  things:  with  respec- 
tability, with  propriety!  When  a  woman  has  nothing  to 
do,  money  and  respectability  mean  that  nothing  is  ever 
allowed  to  happen  to  her.  I  dont  want  to  be  good;  and  I 
dont  want  to  be  bad :  I  just  dont  want  to  be  bothered  about 
either  good  or  bad:   I  want  to  be  an  active  verb. 

Lord  Summerhays.  An  active  verb?  Oh,  I  see.  An 
active  verb  signifies  to  be,  to  do,  or  to  suffer. 

Hypatia.  Just  so:  how  clever  of  you!  I  want  to  be;  I 
want  to  do;  and  I'm  game  to  suffer  if  it  costs  that.  But 
stick  here  doing  nothing  but  being  good  and  nice  and 
ladylike  I  simply  wont.  Stay  down  here  with  us  for  a 
week;  and  I'll  shew  you  what  it  means:  shew  it  to  you 
going  on  day  after  day,  year  after  year,  lifetime  after 
lifetime. 


40  Misalliance 

Lord  Summerhays.    Shew  me  what? 

Htpatia.  Girls  withering  into  ladies.  Ladies  withering 
into  old  maids.  Nursing  old  women.  Running  errands  for 
old  men.  Good  for  nothing  else  at  last.  Oh,  you  cant 
imagine  the  fiendish  selfishness  of  the  old  people  and  the 
maudlin  sacrifice  of  the  young.  It's  more  unbearable  than 
any  poverty:  more  horrible  than  any  regular-right-down 
wickedness.  Oh,  home!  home!  parents!  family!  duty! 
how  I  loathe  them!  How  I'd  like  to  see  them  all  blown  to 
bits!  The  poor  escape.  The  wicked  escape.  Well,  I  cant 
be  poor:  we're  rolling  in  money:  it's  no  use  pretending 
we're  not.  But  I  can  be  wicked;  and  I'm  quite  prepared 
to  be. 

Lord  Summerhays.    You  think  that  easy? 

Hypatia.  Well,  isnt  it?  Being  a  man,  you  ought  to 
know. 

Lord  Summerhays.  It  requires  some  natural  talent, 
which  can  no  doubt  be  cultivated.  It's  not  really  easy  to 
be  anything  out  of  the  common. 

Hypatia.    Anyhow,  I  mean  to  make  a  fight  for  living. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Living  your  own  life,  I  believe  the 
Suffragist  phrase  is. 

Hypatia.  Living  any  life.  Living,  instead  of  withering 
without  even  a  gardener  to  snip  you  off  when  youre  rotten. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Ive  lived  an  active  life;  but  Ive 
withered  all  the  same. 

Hypatia.  No:  youve  worn  out:  thats  quite  different. 
And  youve  some  life  in  you  yet  or  you  wouldnt  have 
fallen  in  love  with  me.  You  can  never  imagine  how 
delighted  I  was  to  find  that  instead  of  being  the  correct 
sort  of  big  panjandrum  you  were  supposed  to  be,  you  were 
really  an  old  rip  like  papa. 

Lord  Summerhays.  No,  no:  not  about  your  father:  I 
really  cant  bear  it.  And  if  you  must  say  these  terrible 
things:  these  heart- wounding  shameful  things,  at  least 
find  something  prettier  to  call  me  than  an  old  rip. 


Misalliance  41 

Hypatia.  Well,  what  would  you  call  a  man  proposing 
to  a  girl  who  might  be 

Lord  Summerhays.    His  daughter:   yes,  I  know. 

Hypatia.    I  was  going  to  say  his  granddaughter. 

Lord  Summerhays.  You  always  have  one  more  blow  to 
get  in. 

Hypatia.  Youre  too  sensitive.  Did  you  ever  make  mud 
pies  when  you  were  a  kid — beg  pardon:    a  child. 

Lord  Summerhays.    I  hope  not. 

Hypatia.  It's  a  dirty  job;  but  Johnny  and  I  were 
vulgar  enough  to  like  it.  I  like  young  people  because 
theyre  not  too  afraid  of  dirt  to  live.  Ive  grown  out  of  the 
mud  pies;  but  I  like  slang;  and  I  like  bustling  you  up  by 
saying  things  that  shock  you;  and  I'd  rather  put  up  with 
swearing  and  smoking  than  with  dull  respectability;  and 
there  are  lots  of  things  that  would  just  shrivel  you  up  that 
I  think  rather  jolly.     Now! 

Lord  Summerhays.  Ive  not  the  slightest  doubt  of  it. 
Dont  insist. 

Hypatia.    It's  not  your  ideal,  is  it? 

Lord  Summerhays.    No. 

Hypatia.  Shall  I  tell  you  why?  Your  ideal  is  an  old 
woman.  I  daresay  shes  got  a  young  face;  but  shes  an 
old  woman.  Old,  old,  old.  Squeamish.  Cant  stand  up 
to  things.  Cant  enjoy  things:  not  real  things.  Always 
on  the  shrink. 

Lord  Summerhays.  On  the  shrink!  Detestable  ex- 
pression. 

Hypatia.  Bah!  you  cant  stand  even  a  little  thing  like 
that.     What  good  are  you?    Oh,  what  good  are  you? 

Lord  Summerhays.  Dont  ask  me.  I  dont  know.  I 
dont  know. 

Tarleton  returns  from  the  vestibule.  Hypatia  sits  down 
demurely. 

Hypatia.  Well,  papa:  have  you  meditated  on  your 
destiny? 


42  Misalliance 

Tarleton  [puzzled]  What?  Oh!  my  destiny.  Gad, 
I  forgot  all  about  it:  Jock  started  a  rabbit  and  put  it  clean 
out  of  my  head.  Besides,  why  should  I  give  way  to  morbid 
introspection?  It's  a  sign  of  madness.  Read  Lombroso. 
[To  Lord  Summerhays]  Well,  Summerhays,  has  my  little 
girl  been  entertaining  you? 

Lord  Summerhays.  Yes.  She  is  a  wonderful  enter- 
tainer. 

Tarleton.  I  think  my  idea  of  bringing  up  a  young  girl 
has  been  rather  a  success.  Dont  you  listen  to  this,  Patsy: 
it  might  make  you  conceited.  Shes  never  been  treated 
like  a  child.  I  always  said  the  same  thing  to  her  mother. 
Let  her  read  what  she  likes.  Let  her  do  what  she  likes. 
Let  her  go  where  she  likes.    Eh,  Patsy? 

Hypatia.  Oh  yes,  if  there  had  only  been  anything  for 
me  to  do,  any  place  for  me  to  go,  anything  I  wanted  to  read. 

Tarleton.  There,  you  see!  Shes  not  satisfied.  Rest- 
less. Wants  things  to  happen.  Wants  adventures  to  drop 
out  of  the  sky. 

Hypatia  [gathering  up  her  work]  If  youre  going  to  talk 
about  me  and  my  education,  I'm  off. 

Tarleton.  Well,  well,  off  with  you.  [To  Lord  Summer- 
hays] Shes  active,  like  me.  She  actually  wanted  me  to 
put  her  into  the  shop. 

Hypatia.  Well,  they  tell  me  that  the  girls  there  have 
adventures  sometimes.    [She  goes  out  through  the  inner  door] 

Tarleton.  She  had  me  there,  though  she  doesnt  know 
it,  poor  innocent  lamb!  Public  scandal  exaggerates  enor- 
mously, of  course;  but  moralize  as  you  will,  superabun- 
dant vitality  is  a  physical  fact  that  cant  be  talked  away. 
[He  sits  down  between  the  writing  table  and  the  sideboard]. 
Difficult  question  this,  of  bringing  up  children.  Between 
ourselves,  it  has  beaten  me.  I  never  was  so  surprised  in 
my  life  as  when  I  came  to  know  Johnny  as  a  man  of 
business  and  found  out  what  he  was  really  like.  How  did 
you  manage  with  your  sons? 


Misalliance  43 

Lord  Summerhays.  Well,  I  really  hadnt  time  to  be  a 
father:  thats  the  plain  truth  of  the  matter.  Their  poor 
dear  mother  did  the  usual  thing  while  they  were  with  us. 
Then  of  course,  Harrow,  Cambridge,  the  usual  routine  of 
their  class.  I  saw  very  little  of  them,  and  thought  very 
little  about  them:  how  could  I?  with  a  whole  province 
on  my  hands.  They  and  I  are — acquaintances.  Not  per- 
haps, quite  ordinary  acquaintances:  theres  a  sort  of — er — 
I  should  almost  call  it  a  sort  of  remorse  about  the  way  we 
shake  hands  (when  we  do  shake  hands)  which  means,  I 
suppose,  that  we're  sorry  we  dont  care  more  for  one  an- 
other; and  I'm  afraid  we  dont  meet  oftener  than  we  can 
help.  We  put  each  other  too  much  out  of  countenance. 
It's  really  a  very  difficult  relation.  To  my  mind  not  alto- 
gether a  natural  one. 

Tarleton  [impressed,  as  usual]  Thats  an  idea,  certainly. 
I  dont  think  anybody  has  ever  written  about  that. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Bentley  is  the  only  one  who  was 
really  my  son  in  any  serious  sense.  He  was  completely 
spoilt.  When  he  was  sent  to  a  preparatory  school  he 
simply  yelled  until  he  was  sent  home.  Harrow  was  out  of 
the  question;  but  we  managed  to  tutor  him  into  Cam- 
bridge. No  use:  he  was  sent  down.  By  that  time  my 
work  was  over;  and  I  saw  a  good  deal  of  him.  But  I 
could  do  nothing  with  him — except  look  on.  I  should 
have  thought  your  case  was  quite  different.  You  keep  up 
the  middle-class  tradition :  the  day  school  and  the  business 
training  instead  of  the  university.  I  believe  in  the  day 
school  part  of  it.  At  all  events,  you  know  your  own 
children. 

Tarleton.  Do  you?  I'm  not  so  sure  of  it.  Fact  is,  my 
dear  Summerhays,  once  childhood  is  over,  once  the  little 
animal  has  got  past  the  stage  at  which  it  acquires  what 
you  might  call  a  sense  of  decency,  it's  all  up  with  the 
relation  between  parent  and  child.  You  cant  get  over  the 
fearful  shyness  of  it. 


44  Misalliance 

Loed  Summerhays.    Shyness? 

Taeleton.    Yes,  shyness.     Read  Dickens. 

Lord  Summerhays  [surprised]  Dickens!!  Of  all  au- 
thors, Charles  Dickens!     Are  you  serious? 

Tarleton.  I  dont  mean  his  books.  Read  his  letters 
to  his  family.  Read  any  man's  letters  to  his  children. 
They  re  not  human.  They  re  not  about  himself  or  them- 
selves. Theyre  about  hotels,  scenery,  about  the  weather, 
about  getting  wet  and  losing  the  train  and  what  he  saw  on 
the  road  and  all  that.  Not  a  word  about  himself.  Forced. 
Shy.  Duty  letters.  All  fit  to  be  published:  that  says 
everything.  I  tell  you  theres  a  wall  ten  feet  thick  and  ten 
miles  high  between  parent  and  child.  I  know  what  I'm 
talking  about.  Ive  girls  in  my  employment:  girls  and 
young  men.  I  had  ideas  on  the  subject.  I  used  to  go  to 
the  parents  and  tell  them  not  to  let  their  children  go  out 
into  the  world  without  instruction  in  the  dangers  and 
temptations  they  were  going  to  be  thrown  into.  What 
did  every  one  of  the  mothers  say  to  me?  "Oh,  sir,  how 
could  I  speak  of  such  things  to  my  own  daughter?"  The 
men  said  I  was  quite  right;  but  they  didnt  do  it,  anymore 
than  I'd  been  able  to  do  it  myself  to  Johnny.  I  had  to 
leave  books  in  his  way;  and  I  felt  just  awful  when  I  did 
it.  Believe  me,  Summerhays,  the  relation  between  the 
young  and  the  old  should  be  an  innocent  relation.  It 
should  be  something  they  could  talk  about.  Well,  the 
relation  between  parent  and  child  may  be  an  affectionate 
relation.  It  may  be  a  useful  relation.  It  may  be  a  neces- 
sary relation.  But  it  can  never  be  an  innocent  relation. 
Youd  die  rather  than  allude  to  it.  Depend  on  it,  in  a 
thousand  years  itll  be  considered  bad  form  to  know  who 
your  father  and  mother  are.  Embarrassing.  Better  hand 
Bentley  over  to  me.  I  can  look  him  in  the  face  and  talk  to 
him  as  man  to  man.    You  can  have  Johnny. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Thank  you.  Ive  lived  so  long  in  a 
country  where  a  man  may  have  fifty  sons,  who  are  no  more 


Misalliance  45 

to  him  than  a  regiment  of  soldiers,  that  I'm  afraid  Ive 
lost  the  English  feeling  about  it. 

Tarleton  [restless  again]  You  mean  Jinghiskahn.  Ah 
yes.  Good  thing  the  empire.  Educates  us.  Opens  our 
minds.  Knocks  the  Bible  out  of  us.  And  civilizes  the 
other  chaps. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Yes:  it  civilizes  them.  And  it 
uncivilizes  us.  Their  gain.  Our  loss,  Tarleton,  believe  me, 
our  loss. 

Tarleton.  Well,  why  not?  Averages  out  the  human 
race.  Makes  the  nigger  half  an  Englishman.  Makes  the 
Englishman  half  a  nigger. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Speaking  as  the  unfortunate  Eng- 
lishman in  question,  I  dont  like  the  process.  If  I  had  my 
life  to  live  over  again,  I'd  stay  at  home  and  supercivilize 
myself. 

Tarleton.  Nonsense!  dont  be  selfish.  Think  how 
you\e  improved  the  other  chaps.  Look  at  the  Spanish 
empire!  Bad  job  for  Spain,  but  splendid  for  South  Amer- 
ica. Look  at  what  the  Romans  did  for  Britain !  They  burst 
up  and  had  to  clear  out;  but  think  of  all  they  taught  us! 
They  were  the  making  of  us:  I  believe  there  was  a  Roman 
camp  on  Hindhead:  I'll  shew  it  to  you  tomorrow.  Thats 
the  good  side  of  Imperialism:  it's  unselfish.  I  despise 
the  Little  Englanders:  theyre  always  thinking  about 
England.  Smallminded.  I'm  for  the  Parliament  of  man, 
the  federation  of  the  world.  Read  Tennyson.  [He  settles 
down  again].     Then  theres  the  great  food  question. 

Lord  Summerhays  [apprehensively]  Need  we  go  into 
that  this  afternoon? 

Tarleton.  No;  but  I  wish  youd  tell  the  Chickabiddy 
that  the  Jinghiskahns  eat  no  end  of  toasted  cheese,  and 
that  it's  the  secret  of  their  amazing  health  and  long 
life! 

Lord  Summerhays.  Unfortunately  they  are  neither 
healthy  nor  long  lived.    And  they  dont  eat  toasted  cheese. 


46 


Misalliance 


Tarleton.  There  you  are!  They  would  be  if  they  ate 
it.  Anyhow,  say  what  you  like,  provided  the  moral  is  a 
Welsh  rabbit  for  my  supper. 

Lord  Summerhays.     British  morality  in  a  nutshell! 

Tarleton  [hugely  amused]  Yes.  Ha  ha!  Awful  hypo- 
crites, aint  we? 

They  are  interrupted  by  excited  cries  from  the  grounds. 

Hypatia  J  Papa!  Mamma!  Come  out  as  fast  as  you 
can.    Quick.    Quick. 

Bentley  Hello,  governor!  Come  out.  An  aeroplane. 
Look,  look. 

Tarleton  [starting  up]  Aeroplane!  Did  he  say  an 
aeroplane? 

Lord  Summerhays.  Aeroplane!  [A  shadow  falls  on  the 
pavilion;  and  some  of  the  glass  at  the  top  is  shattered  and 
falls  on  tlie  floor]. 

Tarleton  and  Lord  Summerhays  rush  out  through  the  pa- 
vilion into  the  garden. 

Hypatia 


Bentley 


Tarleton 


Take    care.      Take    care    of    the 

chimney. 
Come  this  side:   it's  coming  right 

where  youre  standing. 
Hallo!    where  the  devil  are  you 
coming?    youll   have   my  roof 
off. 
He's  lost  control. 
Mrs  Tarleton.    Look,  look,  Hypatia.     There  are  two 
people  in  it. 

Bentley.    Theyve  cleared  it.     Well  steered! 


Lord  Summerhays 


Tarleton 

Lord  Summerhays 
Mrs  Tarleton 

Bentley 


Yes;  but  theyre  coming  slam  into 

the  greenhouse. 
Look  out  for  the  glass. 
Theyll  break  all  the  glass.    Theyll 

spoil  all  the  grapes. 
Mind  where  youre  coming.    He'll 

save  it.     No:    theyre  down. 


Lord  Summer- 
hats 
Hypatia 


Tarleton 


Misalliance  47 

An  appalling  crash  of  breaking  glass  is  heard.  Everybody 
shrieks. 

Mrs  Tarleton  (  Oh,  are  they  killed?    John:  are  they 

killed? 
Are  you  hurt?     Is  anything  broken? 

Can  you  stand? 
Oh,  you  must  be  hurt.  Are  you  sure? 
Shall  I  get  you  some  water?  Or 
some  wine? 
Are  you  all  right?  Sure  you  wont  have 
some  brandy  just  to  take  off  the 
shock. 

The  Aviator.  No,  thank  you.  Quite  right.  Not  a 
scratch.    I  assure  you  I'm  all  right. 

Bentley.  What  luck!  And  what  a  smash!  You  are 
a  lucky  chap,  I  can  tell  you. 

The  Aviator  and  Tarleton  come  in  through  the  pavilion, 
followed  by  Lord  Summerhays  and  Bentley,  tlie  Aviator  on 
Tarleton's  right.    Bentley  passes  the  Aviator  and  turns  to  have 
an  admiring  look  at  him.    Lord  Summerhays  overtakes  Tarle- 
ton less  pointedly  on  the  opposite  side  with  the  same  object. 

The  Aviator.  I'm  really  very  sorry.  I'm  afraid  Ive 
knocked  your  vinery  into  a  cocked  hat.  (Effusively)  You 
dont  mind,  do  you? 

Tarleton.  Not  a  bit.  Come  in  and  have  some  tea. 
Stay  to  dinner.  Stay  over  the  week-end.  All  my  life  Ive 
wanted  to  fly. 

The  Aviator  [taking  of  his  goggles]  Youre  really  more 
than  kind. 

Bentley.    Why,  its  Joey  Percival. 
Perctval.    Hallo,  Ben!    That  you? 
Tarleton.    What!    The  man  with  three  fathers! 
Percival.    Oh!   has  Ben  been  talking  about  me? 
Tarleton.    Consider  yourself  as  one  of  the  family — if 
you  will  do  me  the  honor.    And  your  friend  too.     Wheres 
your  friend? 


48  Misalliance 

Percival.  Oh,  by  the  way!  before  he  comes  in :  let  me 
explain.     I  dont  know  him. 

Tarleton.    Eh? 

Percival.  Havnt  even  looked  at  him.  I'm  trying  to 
make  a  club  record  with  a  passenger.  The  club  supplied 
the  passenger.  He  just  got  in;  and  Ive  been  too  busy 
handling  the  aeroplane  to  look  at  him.  I  havnt  said  a 
word  to  him;  and  I  cant  answer  for  him  socially;  but 
hes  an  ideal  passenger  for  a  flyer.  He  saved  me  from  a 
smash. 

Lord  Summerhays.  I  saw  it.  It  was  extraordinary. 
When  you  were  thrown  out  he  held  on  to  the  top  bar 
with  one  hand.  You  came  past  him  in  the  air,  going 
straight  for  the  glass.  He  caught  you  and  turned  you 
off  into  the  flower  bed,  and  then  lighted  beside  you  like 
a  bird. 

Percival.  How  he  kept  his  head  I  cant  imagine. 
Frankly,  /  didnt. 

The  Passenger,  also  begoggled,  comes  in  through  the 
'pavilion  with  Johnny  and  the  two  ladies.  The  Pas- 
senger comes  between  Percival  and  Tarleton,  Mrs  Tarle- 
ton between  Lord  Summerhays  and  her  husband,  Hypatia 
between  Percival  and  Bentley,  and  Johnny  to  Bentley's 
right. 

Tarleton.  Just  discussing  your  prowess,  my  dear 
sir.  Magnificent.  Youll  stay  to  dinner.  Youll  stay  the 
night.  Stay  over  the  week.  The  Chickabiddy  will  be 
delighted. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Wont  you  take  off  your  goggles  and 
have  some  tea? 

The  Passenger  begins  to  remove  the  goggles. 

Tarleton.  Do.  Have  a  wash.  Johnny:  take  the  gen- 
tleman to  your  room:  I'll  look  after  Mr  Percival.  They 
must — 

By  this  time  the  passenger  has  got  the  goggles  off,  and 
stands  revealed  as  a  remarkably  good-looking  woman. 


Misalliance 


49 


Mrs  Tarleton 

Bentley 

Johnny 

Lord  Summerhays 

Hypatia 

Tarleton 

Percival 


f  Well  I  never!!! 
[in  a  whisper]  Oh,  I  say ! 
By  George! 

A  lady!  I  All 

A  woman!  (  together, 

[to  Percival]  You  never 

told  me — 
I  hadnt  the  least  idea — 
An  embarrassed  pause. 

Percival.  I  assure  you  if  I'd  had  the  faintest  notion 
that  my  passenger  was  a  lady  I  shouldnt  have  left  you  to 
shift  for  yourself  in  that  selfish  way. 

Lord  Summerhays.  The  lady  seems  to  have  shifted  for 
both  very  effectually,  sir. 

Percival.  Saved  my  life.  I  admit  it  most  grate- 
fully. 

Tarleton.  I  must  apologize,  madam,  for  having  of- 
fered you  the  civilities  appropriate  to  the  opposite  sex. 
And  yet,  why  opposite?  We  are  all  human:  males  and 
females  of  the  same  species.  When  the  dress  is  the  same 
the  distinction  vanishes.  I'm  proud  to  receive  in  my 
house  a  lady  of  evident  refinement  and  distinction.  Allow 
me  to  introduce  myself:  Tarleton:  John  Tarleton  {seeing 
conjecture  in  the  passenger's  eye) — yes,  yes:  Tarleton's  Un- 
derwear. My  wife,  Mrs  Tarleton:  youll  excuse  me  for 
having  in  what  I  had  taken  to  be  a  confidence  between  man 
and  man  alluded  to  her  as  the  Chickabiddy.  My  daughter 
Hypatia,  who  has  always  wanted  some  adventure  to  drop 
out  of  the  sky,  and  is  now,  I  hope,  satisfied  at  last.  Lord 
Summerhays:  a  man  known  wherever  the  British  flag 
waves.  His  son  Bentley,  engaged  to  Hypatia.  Mr  Joseph 
Percival,  the  promising  son  of  three  highly  intellectual 
fathers. 

Hypatia  [startled]    Bentley's  friend?     [Bentley  nods]. 
Tarleton  [continuing,  to  the  passenger]    May  I  now  ask 
to  be  allowed  the  pleasure  of  knowing  your  name? 


50  Misalliance 

The  Passenger.  My  name  is  Lina  Szczepanowska  [pro- 
nouncing it  Sh-Chepanovska]. 

Percival.    Sh I  beg  your  pardon? 

Lina.    Szczepanowska. 

Percival  [dubiously]    Thank  you. 

Tarleton  [very  politely]  Would  you  mind  saying  it  again? 

Lina.    Say  fish. 

Tarleton.    Fish. 

Lina.    Say  church. 

Tarleton.    Church. 

Lina.    Say  fish  church. 

Tarleton  [remonstrating]    But  it's  not  good  sense. 

Lina  [inexorable]    Say  fish  church. 

Tarleton.    Fish  church. 

Lina.    Again. 

Tarleton.    No,  but — [resigning  himself]  fish  church. 

Lina.    Now  say  Szczepanowska. 

Tarleton.  Szczepanowska.  Got  it,  by  Gad.  [A  sibi- 
lant whispering  becomes  audible:  they  are  all  saying  Sh-ch  to 
themselves],  Szczepanowska!  Not  an  English  name, 
is  it? 

Lina.    Polish.    I'm  a  Pole. 

Tarleton.  Ah  yes.  Interesting  nation.  Lucky  people 
to  get  the  government  of  their  country  taken  off  their 
hands.  Nothing  to  do  but  cultivate  themselves.  Same 
as  we  took  Gibraltar  off  the  hands  of  the  Spaniards.  Saves 
the  Spanish  taxpayer.  Jolly  good  thing  for  us  if  the  Ger- 
mans took  Portsmouth.     Sit  down,  wont  you? 

The  group  breaks  up.  Johnny  and  Bentley  hurry  to  the 
pavilion  and  fetch  the  two  wicker  chairs.  Johnny  gives  his  to 
Lina.  Hypatia  and  Percival  take  the  chairs  at  the  worktable. 
Lord  Summerhays  gives  the  chair  at  the  vestibule  end  of  the 
writing  table  to  Mrs  Tarleton;  and  Bentley  replaces  it  with  a 
wicker  chair,  which  Lord  Summerhays  takes.  Johnny  re- 
mains standing  behind  the  worktable,  Bentley  behind  his 
father. 


Misalliance  51 

Mrs  Tarleton  [to  Lina]    Have  some  tea  now,  wont  you? 

Lina.    I  never  drink  tea. 

Tarleton  [sitting  down  at  the  end  of  the  writing  table 
nearest  Lina]  Bad  thing  to  aeroplane  on,  I  should  imagine. 
Too  jumpy.     Been  up  much? 

Lina.  Not  in  an  aeroplane.  Ive  parachuted;  but  thats 
child's  play. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  But  arnt  you  very  foolish  to  run  such  a 
dreadful  risk? 

Lina.    You  cant  live  without  running  risks. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  what  a  thing  to  say!  Didnt  you 
know  you  might  have  been  killed? 

Lina.    That  was  why  I  went  up. 

Hypatia.  Of  course.  Cant  you  understand  the  fasci- 
nation of  the  thing?  the  novelty!  the  daring!  the  sense  of 
something  happening! 

Lina.  Oh  no.  It's  too  tame  a  business  for  that.  I  went 
up  for  family  reasons. 

Tarleton.    Eh?     What?     Family  reasons? 

Mrs  Tarleton.    I  hope  it  wasnt  to  spite  your  mother? 

Percival  [quickly]    Or  your  husband? 

Lina.  I'm  not  married.  And  why  should  I  want  to  spite 
my  mother? 

Hypatia  [aside  to  Percival]  That  was  clever  of  you,  Mr 
Percival. 

Percival.    What? 

Hypatia.    To  find  out. 

Tarleton.  I'm  in  a  difficulty.  I  cant  understand  a 
lady  going  up  in  an  aeroplane  for  family  reasons.  It's 
rude  to  be  curious  and  ask  questions;  but  then  it's  inhu- 
man to  be  indifferent,  as  if  you  didnt  care. 

Lina.  I'll  tell  you  with  pleasure.  For  the  last  hundred 
and  fifty  years,  not  a  single  day  has  passed  without  some 
member  of  my  family  risking  his  life — or  her  life.  It's 
a  point  of  honor  with  us  to  keep  up  that  tradition.  Usu- 
ally several  of  us  do  it;    but  it  happens  that  just  at  this 


52  Misalliance 

moment  it  is  being  kept  up  by  one  of  my  brothers  only. 
Early  this  morning  I  got  a  telegram  from  him  to  say  that 
there  had  been  a  fire,  and  that  he  could  do  nothing  for  the 
rest  of  the  week.  Fortunately  I  had  an  invitation  from  the 
Aerial  League  to  see  this  gentleman  try  to  break  the  pas- 
senger record.  I  appealed  to  the  President  of  the  League 
to  let  me  save  the  honor  of  my  family.  He  arranged  it 
for  me. 

Tarleton.  Oh,  I  must  be  dreaming.  This  is  stark  rav- 
ing nonsense. 

Lina  [quietly]    You  are  quite  awake,  sir. 

Johnny.  We  cant  all  be  dreaming  the  same  thing, 
Governor. 

Tarleton.  Of  course  not,  you  duffer;  but  then  I'm 
dreaming  you  as  well  as  the  lady. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Dont  be  silly,  John.  The  lady  is  only 
joking,  I'm  sure.  [To  Lina]  I  suppose  your  luggage  is  in 
the  aeroplane. 

Percival.  Luggage  was  out  of  the  question.  If  I  stay 
to  dinner  I'm  afraid  I  cant  change  unless  youll  lend  me 
some  clothes. 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Do  you  mean  neither  of  you? 

Percival.    I'm  afraid  so. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh  well,  never  mind:  Hypatia  will 
lend  the  lady  a  gown. 

Lina.  Thank  you:  I'm  quite  comfortable  as  I  am. 
I  am  not  accustomed  to  gowns:  they  hamper  me  and 
make  me  feel  ridiculous;  so  if  you  dont  mind  I  shall  not 
change. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Well,  I'm  beginning  to  think  I'm  doing 
a  bit  of  dreaming  myself. 

Hypatia  [impatiently]  Oh,  it's  all  right,  mamma. 
Johnny:  look  after  Mr.  Percival.  [To  Lina,  rising]  Come 
with  me. 

Lina  follows  her  to  the  inner  door.     They  all  rise. 

Johnny  [to  Percival]    I'll  shew  you. 


Misalliance  53 

Percival.    Thank  you. 

Lina  goes  out  with  Hypatia,  and  Percival  with  Johnny. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Well,  this  is  a  nice  thing  to  happen! 
And  look  at  the  greenhouse!  Itll  cost  thirty  pounds  to 
mend  it.  People  have  no  right  to  do  such  things.  And 
you  invited  thein  to  dinner  too!  What  sort  of  woman  is 
that  to  have  in  our  house  when  you  know  that  all  Hindhead 
will  be  calling  on  us  to  see  that  aeroplane?  Bunny:  come 
with  me  and  help  me  to  get  all  the  people  out  of  the 
grounds:  I  declare  they  came  running  as  if  theyd  sprung 
up  out  of  the  earth  [she  makes  for  the  inner  door]. 

Tarleton.  No:  dont  you  trouble,  Chickabiddy:  I'll 
tackle  em. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Indeed  youll  do  nothing  of  the  kind: 
youll  stay  here  quietly  with  Lord  Summerhays.  Youd 
invite  them  all  to  dinner.  Come,  Bunny.  [She  goes  out, 
followed  by  Bentley.     Lord  Summerhays  sits  down  again]. 

Tarleton.  Singularly  beautiful  woman,  Summerhays. 
What  do  you  make  of  her?  She  must  be  a  princess.  Whats 
this  family  of  warriors  and  statesmen  that  risk  their  lives 
every  day? 

Lord  Summerhays.  They  are  evidently  not  warriors 
and  statesmen,  or  they  wouldnt  do  that. 

Tarleton.    Well,  then,  who  the  devil  are  they? 

Lord  Summerhays.  I  think  I  know.  The  last  time  I 
saw  that  lady,  she  did  something  I  should  not  have  thought 
possible. 

Tarleton.    What  was  that? 

Lord  Summerhays.  Well,  she  walked  backwards  along 
a  taut  wire  without  a  balancing  pole  and  turned  a  somer- 
sault in  the  middle.  I  remember  that  her  name  was  Lina, 
and  that  the  other  name  was  foreign;  though  I  dont  recol- 
lect it. 

Tarleton.  Szcz!  You  couldnt  have  forgotten  that  if 
youd  heard  it. 

Lord  Summerhays.    I  didnt  hear  it:  I  only  saw  it  on  a 


54  Misalliance 

program.  But  it's  clear  shes  an  acrobat.  It  explains  how 
she  saved  Percival.    And  it  accounts  for  her  family  pride. 

Tarleton.  An  acrobat,  eh?  Good,  good,  good!  Sum- 
merhays :  that  brings  her  within  reach.  Thats  better  than 
a  princess.  I  steeled  this  evergreen  heart  of  mine  when  I 
thought  she  was  a  princess.  Now  I  shall  let  it  be  touched. 
She  is  accessible.     Good. 

Lord  Summerhays.  I  hope  you  are  not  serious.  Re- 
member: you  have  a  family.  You  have  a  position.  You 
are  not  in  your  first  youth. 

Tarleton.    No  matter. 

Theres  magic  in  the  night 
When  the  heart  is  young. 

My  heart  is  young.  Besides,  I'm  a  married  man,  not  a 
widower  like  you.  A  married  man  can  do  anything  he  likes 
if  his  wife  dont  mind.  A  widower  cant  be  too  careful.  Not 
that  I  would  have  you  think  me  an  unprincipled  man  or  a 
bad  husband.  I'm  not.  But  Ive  a  superabundance  of  vi- 
tality.    Read  Pepys'  Diary. 

Lord  Summerhays.  The  woman  is  your  guest,  Tarleton. 

Tarleton.  Well,  is  she?  A  woman  I  bring  into  my 
house  is  my  guest.  A  woman  you  bring  into  my  house  is 
my  guest.  But  a  woman  who  drops  bang  down  out  of  the 
sky  into  my  greenhouse  and  smashes  every  blessed  pane  of 
glass  in  it  must  take  her  chance. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Still,  you  know  that  my  name  must 
not  be  associated  with  any  scandal.  Youll  be  careful, 
wont  you? 

Tarleton.  Oh  Lord,  yes.  Yes,  yes,  yes,  yes,  yes.  I 
was  only  joking,  of  course. 

Mrs  Tarleton  comes  back  through  the  inner  door. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Well  I  never !  John :  I  dont  think  that 
young  woman's  right  in  her  head.  Do  you  know  what  shes 
just  asked  for? 

Tarleton.    Champagne? 


Misalliance  55 

Mrs  Tarleton.  No.  She  wants  a  Bible  and  six  oranges. 

Tarleton.    What? 

Mrs  Tarleton.    A  Bible  and  six  oranges. 

Tarleton.  I  understand  the  oranges:  shes  doing  an 
orange  cure  of  some  sort.  But  what  on  earth  does  she  want 
the  Bible  for? 

Mrs  Tarleton.  I'm  sure  I  cant  imagine.  She  cant  be 
right  in  her  head. 

Lord  Summerhays.    Perhaps  she  wants  to  read  it. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  But  why  should  she,  on  a  weekday,  at 
all  events.  What  would  you  advise  me  to  do,  Lord  Sum- 
merhays? 

Lord  Summerhays.    Well,  is  there  a  Bible  in  the  house? 

Tarleton.  Stacks  of  em.  Theres  the  family  Bible,  and 
the  Dore  Bible,  and  the  parallel  revised  version  Bible,  and 
the  Doves  Press  Bible,  and  Johnny's  Bible  and  Bobby's 
Bible  and  Patsy's  Bible,  and  the  Chickabiddy's  Bible  and 
my  Bible;  and  I  daresay  the  servants  could  raise  a  few 
more  between  them.     Let  her  have  the  lot. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Dont  talk  like  that  before  Lord  Sum- 
merhays, John. 

Lord  Summerhays.  It  doesnt  matter,  Mrs  Tarleton :  in 
Jinghiskahn  it  was  a  punishable  offence  to  expose  a  Bible 
for  sale.     The  empire  has  no  religion. 

Lina  comes  in.  She  has  left  her  cap  in  Hypatia's  room. 
She  stops  on  the  landing  just  inside  the  door,  and  speaks  over 
the  handrail. 

Lina.  Oh,  Mrs  Tarleton,  shall  I  be  making  myself 
very  troublesome  if  I  ask  for  a  music-stand  in  my  room 
as  well? 

Tarleton.  Not  at  all.  You  can  have  the  piano  if  you 
like.     Or  the  gramophone.     Have  the  gramophone. 

Lina.    No,  thank  you:   no  music. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [going  to  the  steps]  Do  you  think  it's 
good  for  you  to  eat  so  many  oranges?  Arnt  you  afraid  of 
getting  jaundice? 


56  Misalliance 

Lina  [coming  down]  Not  in  the  least.  But  billiard  balls 
will  do  quite  as  well. 

Mrs  Tarleton.    But  you  cant  eat  billiard  balls,  child! 

Tarleton.  Get  em,  Chickabiddy.  I  understand.  [He 
imitates  a  juggler  tossing  up  balls].   Eh? 

Lina  [going  to  him,  past  his  wife]    Just  so. 

Tarleton.  Billiard  balls  and  cues.  Plates,  knives,  and 
forks.     Two  paraffin  lamps  and  a  hatstand. 

Lina.  No:  that  is  popular  low-class  business.  In  our 
family  we  touch  nothing  but  classical  work.  Anybody  can 
do  lamps  and  hatstands.  I  can  do  silver  bullets.  That  is 
really  hard.  [She  passes  on  to  Lord  Summerhays,  and  looks 
gravely  down  at  him  as  he  sits  by  the  writing  table]. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Well,  I'm  sure  I  dont  know  what  youre 
talking  about;  and  I  only  hope  you  know  yourselves. 
However,  you  shall  have  what  you  want,  of  course.  [She 
goes  up  the  steps  and  leaves  the  room]. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Will  you  forgive  my  curiosity? 
What  is  the  Bible  for? 

Lina.    To  quiet  my  soul. 

Lord  Summerhays  [with  a  sigh]  Ah  yes,  yes.  It  no 
longer  quiets  mine,  I  am  sorry  to  say. 

Lina.  That  is  because  you  do  not  know  how  to  read  it. 
Put  it  up  before  you  on  a  stand;  and  open  it  at  the  Psalms. 
When  you  can  read  them  and  understand  them,  quite 
quietly  and  happily,  and  keep  six  balls  in  the  air  all  the 
time,  you  are  in  perfect  condition;  and  youll  never  make 
a  mistake  that  evening.  If  you  find  you  cant  do  that,  then 
go  and  pray  until  you  can.  And  be  very  careful  that 
evening. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Is  that  the  usual  form  of  test  in 
your  profession? 

Lina.  Nothing  that  we  Szczepanowskis  do  is  usual,  my 
lord. 

Lord  Summerhays.    Are  you  all  so  wonderful? 

Lina.    It  is  our  profession  to  be  wonderful. 


Misalliance  57 

Lord  Summerhays.  Do  you  never  condescend  to  do 
as  common  people  do?  For  instance,  do  you  not  pray  as 
common  people  pray? 

Lina.  Common  people  do  not  pray,  my  lord:  they  only 
beg. 

Lord  Summerhays.    You  never  ask  for  anything? 

Lina.   No. 

Lord  Summerhays.    Then  why  do  you  pray? 

Lina.    To  remind  myself  that  I  have  a  soul. 

Tarleton  [walking  about]  True.  Fine.  Good.  Beau- 
tiful. All  this  damned  materialism:  what  good  is  it  to 
anybody?  Ive  got  a  soul:  dont  tell  me  I  havnt.  Cut  me 
up  and  you  cant  find  it.  Cut  up  a  steam  engine  and  you 
cant  find  the  steam.  But,  by  George,  it  makes  the  engine 
go.  Say  what  you  will,  Summerhays,  the  divine  spark  is 
a  fact. 

Lord  Summerhays.    Have  I  denied  it? 

Tarleton.  Our  whole  civilization  is  a  denial  of  it. 
Read  Walt  Whitman. 

Lord  Summerhays.  I  shall  go  to  the  billiard  room  and 
get  the  balls  for  you. 

Lina.    Thank  you. 

Lord  Summerhays  goes  out  through  tlie  vestibule  door. 

Tarleton  [going  to  her]  Listen  to  me.  [She  turns 
quickly].  What  you  said  just  now  was  beautiful.  You 
touch  chords.  You  appeal  to  the  poetry  in  a  man.  You 
inspire  him.  Come  now!  Youre  a  woman  of  the  world: 
youre  independent:  you  must  have  driven  lots  of  men 
crazy.  You  know  the  sort  of  man  I  am,  dont  you?  See 
through  me  at  a  glance,  eh? 

Lina.  Yes.  [She  sits  down  quietly  in  the  chair  Lord 
Summerhays  has  just  left]. 

Tarleton.  Good.  Well,  do  you  like  me?  Dont  mis- 
understand me:  I'm  perfectly  aware  that  youre  not 
going  to  fall  in  love  at  first  sight  with  a  ridiculous  old 
shopkeeper.    I  cant  help  that  ridiculous  old  shopkeeper.    I 


58  Misalliance 

have  to  carry  him  about  with  me  whether  I  like  it  or  not. 
I  have  to  pay  for  his  clothes,  though  I  hate  the  cut  of 
them:  especially  the  waistcoat.  I  have  to  look  at  him  in 
the  glass  while  I'm  shaving.  I  loathe  him  because  hes  a 
living  lie.  My  soul's  not  like  that:  it's  like  yours.  I  want 
to  make  a  fool  of  myself.    About  you.    Will  you  let  me? 

Lina  [very  calm]    How  much  will  you  pay? 

Tarleton.  Nothing.  But  I'll  throw  as  many  sover- 
eigns as  you  like  into  the  sea  to  shew  you  that  I'm  in 
earnest. 

Lina.    Are  those  your  usual  terms? 

Tarleton.    No.    I  never  made  that  bid  before. 

Lina  [producing  a  dainty  little  book  and  preparing  to  write 
in  it]    What  did  you  say  your  name  was? 

Tarleton.  John  Tarleton.  The  great  John  Tarleton 
of  Tarleton's  Underwear. 

Lina  [writing]    T-a-r-1-e-t-o-n.    Er ?    [She  looks  up 

at  him  inquiringly]. 

Tarleton  [promptly]    Fifty-eight. 

Lina.  Thank  you.  I  keep  a  list  of  all  my  offers.  I  like 
to  know  what  I'm  considered  worth. 

Tarleton.    Let  me  look. 

Lina  [offering  the  book  to  him]    It's  in  Polish. 

Tarleton.    Thats  no  good.    Is  mine  the  lowest  offer? 

Lina.    No:    the  highest. 

Tarleton.  What  do  most  of  them  come  to?  Dia- 
monds?    Motor  cars?     Furs?     Villa  at  Monte  Carlo? 

Lina.  Oh  yes:  all  that.  And  sometimes  the  devotion 
of  a  lifetime. 

Tarleton.  Fancy  that!  A  young  man  offering  a 
woman  his  old  age  as  a  temptation! 

Lina.    By  the  way,  you  did  not  say  how  long. 

Tarleton.    Until  you  get  tired  of  me. 

Lina.    Or  until  you  get  tired  of  me? 

Tarleton.  I  never  get  tired.  I  never  go  on  long 
enough  for  that.     But  when  it  becomes  so  grand,  so  in- 


Misalliance  59 

spiring  that  I  feel  that  everything  must  be  an  anti-climax 
after  that,  then  I  run  away. 

Lina.    Does  she  let  you  go  without  a  struggle? 

Tarleton.  Yes.  Glad  to  get  rid  of  me.  When  love 
takes  a  man  as  it  takes  me — when  it  makes  him  great — 
it  frightens  a  woman. 

Lina.  The  lady  here  is  your  wife,  isnt  she?  Dont  you 
care  for  her? 

Tarleton.  Yes.  And  mind!  she  comes  first  always.  I 
reserve  her  dignity  even  when  I  sacrifice  my  own.  Youll 
respect  that  point  of  honor,  wont  you? 

Lina.    Only  a  point  of  honor? 

Tarleton  [impulsively]  No,  by  God!  a  point  of  affec- 
tion as  well. 

Lina  [smiling,  pleased  with  him]  Shake  hands,  old  pal 
[she  rises  and  offers  him  her  hand  frankly]. 

Tarleton  [giving  his  hand  rather  dolefully]  Thanks. 
That  means  no,  doesnt  it? 

Lina.  It  means  something  that  will  last  longer  than  yes. 
I  like  you.  I  admit  you  to  my  friendship.  What  a  pity 
you  were  not  trained  when  you  were  young!  Youd  be 
young  still. 

Tarleton.  I  suppose,  to  an  athlete  like  you,  I'm  pretty 
awful,  eh? 

Lina.    Shocking. 

Tarleton.  Too  much  crumb.  Wrinkles.  Yellow 
patches  that  wont  come  off.  Short  wind.  I  know.  I'm 
ashamed  of  myself.    I  could  do  nothing  on  the  high  rope. 

Lina.  Oh  yes:  I  could  put  you  in  a  wheelbarrow  and 
run  you  along,  two  hundred  feet  up. 

Tarleton  [shuddering]  Ugh!  Well,  I'd  do  even  that 
for  you.     Read  The  Master  Builder. 

Lina.    Have  you  learnt  everything  from  books? 

Tarleton.  Well,  have  you  learnt  everything  from  the 
flying  trapeze? 

Lina.    On    the    flying   trapeze   there   is   often    another 


60  Misalliance 

woman;    and  her  life  is  in  your  hands  every  night  and 
your  life  in  hers. 

Tarleton.    Lina:    I'm  going  to  make  a  fool  of  myself. 
I'm  going  to  cry  [he  crumples  into  the  nearest  chair]. 
;     Lina.    Pray  instead:    dont  cry.     Why  should  you  cry? 
Youre  not  the  first  I've  said  no  to. 

Tarleton.  If  you  had  said  yes,  should  I  have  been  the 
first  then? 

Lina.  What  right  have  you  to  ask?  Have  I  asked  am  / 
the  first? 

Tarleton.  Youre  right:  a  vulgar  question.  To  a  man 
like  me,  everybody  is  the  first.    Life  renews  itself. 

Lina.    The  youngest  child  is  the  sweetest. 

Tarleton.    Dont  probe  too  deep,  Lina.    It  hurts. 

Lina.  You  must  get  out  of  the  habit  of  thinking  that 
these  things  matter  so  much.     It's  linendraperish. 

Tarleton.  Youre  quite  right.  Ive  often  said  so.  All 
the  same,  it  does  matter;  for  I  want  to  cry.  [He  buries 
his  face  in  his  arms  on  the  work-table  and  sobs], 

Lina  [going  to  him]  O  la  la!  [She  slaps  him  vigorously, 
but  not  unkindly,  on  the  shoulder].  Courage,  old  pal,  cour- 
age!   Have  you  a  gymnasium  here? 

Tarleton.  Theres  a  trapeze  and  bars  and  things  in  the 
billiard  room. 

Lina.  Come.  You  need  a  few  exercises.  I'll  teach  you 
how  to  stop  crying.  [She  takes  his  arm  and  leads  him  off 
into  the  vestibule], 

A  young  man,  cheaply  dressed  and  strange  in  manner,  ap- 
pears in  the  garden;  steals  to  the  pavilion  door;  and  looks  in. 
Seeing  that  there  is  nobody,  he  enters  cautiously  until  he  has 
come  far  enough  to  see  into  the  hatstand  corner.  He  draws  a 
revolver,  and  examines  it,  apparently  to  make  sure  that  it  is 
loaded.  Then  his  attention  is  caught  by  the  Turkish  bath. 
He  looks  down  the  lunette,  and  opens  the  panels. 

Hypatia  [calling  in  the  garden]  Mr  Percival!  Mr  Per- 
cival!    Where  are  you? 


Misalliance  61 

The  young  man  viakes  for  the  door,  but  sees  Percival  com- 
ing. He  turns  and  bolts  into  the  Turkish  bath,  which  he  closes 
upon  himself  just  in  time  to  escape  being  caught  by  Percival, 
who  runs  in  through  the  pavilion,  bareheaded.  He  also,  it 
appears,  is  in  search  of  a  hiding-place;  for  he  stops  and 
turns  between  the  two  tables  to  take  a  survey  of  the  room;  then 
runs  into  the  corner  between  the  end  of  the  sideboard  and  the 
wall.  Hypatia,  excited,  mischievous,  her  eyes  gloioing,  runs 
in,  precisely  on  his  trail;  turns  at  the  same  spot;  and  discov- 
ers him  just  as  he  makes  a  dash  for  the  pavilion  door.  She 
flies  back  and  intercepts  him. 

Hypatia.     Aha!  arnt  you  glad  Ive  caught  you? 

Percival  [illhumoredly  turning  away  from  her  and  com- 
ing towards  the  writing  table]  No  I'm  not.  Confound  it, 
what  sort  of  girl  are  you?  What  sort  of  house  is  this? 
Must  I  throw  all  good  manners  to  the  winds? 

Hypatia  [following  him]  Do,  do,  do,  do,  do.  This  is  the 
house  of  a  respectable  shopkeeper,  enormously  rich.  This 
is  the  respectable  shopkeeper's  daughter,  tired  of  good 
manners.  [Slipping  her  left  hand  into  his  right]  Come, 
handsome  young  man,  and  play  with  the  respectable  shop- 
keeper's daughter. 

Percival  [withdrawing  quickly  from  her  touch]  No,  no: 
dont  you  know  you  mustnt  go  on  like  this  with  a  perfect 
stranger? 

Hypatia.  Dropped  down  from  the  sky.  Dont  you  know 
that  you  must  always  go  on  like  this  when  you  get  the 
chance?  You  must  come  to  the  top  of  the  hill  and  chase  me 
through  the  bracken.     You  may  kiss  me  if  you  catch  me. 

Percival.   I  shall  do  nothing  of  the  sort. 

Hypatia.  Yes  you  will:  you  cant  help  yourself.  Come 
along.  [She  seizes  his  sleeve].  Fool,  fool:  come  along. 
Dont  you  want  to? 

Percival.  No:  certainly  not.  I  should  never  be  for- 
given if  I  did  it. 

Hypatia.    Youll  never  forgive  yourself  if  you  dont. 


62  Misalliance 

Percival.  Nonsense.  Youre  engaged  to  Ben.  Ben's" 
my  friend.     What  do  you  take  me  for? 

Hypatia.  Ben's  old.  Ben  was  born  old.  Theyre  all 
old  here,  except  you  and  me  and  the  man-woman  or 
woman-man  or  whatever  you  call  her  that  came  with  you. 
They  never  do  anything:  they  only  discuss  whether  what 
other  people  do  is  right.  Come  and  give  them  something 
to  discuss. 

Percival.    I  will  do  nothing  incorrect. 

Hypatia.  Oh,  dont  be  afraid,  little  boy:  youll  get 
nothing  but  a  kiss;  and  I'll  fight  like  the  devil  to  keep 
you  from  getting  that.  But  we  must  play  on  the  hill  and 
race  through  the  heather. 

Percival.    Why? 

Hypatia.    Because  we  want  to,  handsome  young  man. 

Percival.    But  if  everybody  went  on  in  this  way — 

Hypatia.  How  happy!  oh  how  happy  the  world  would 
be! 

Percival.    But  the  consequences  may  be  serious. 

Hypatia.  Nothing  is  worth  doing  unless  the  conse- 
quences may  be  serious.  My  father  says  so;  and  I'm  my 
father's  daughter. 

Percival.  I'm  the  son  of  three  fathers.  I  mistrust 
these  wild  impulses. 

Hypatia.  Take  care.  Youre  letting  the  moment  slip. 
I  feel  the  first  chill  of  the  wave  of  prudence.    Save  me. 

Percival.  Really,  Miss  Tarleton  [she  strikes  him  across 
the  face]—  Damn  you!  [Recovering  himself,  horrified  at  his 
lapse]  I  beg  your  pardon;  but  since  weve  both  forgotten 
ourselves,  youll  please  allow  me  to  leave  the  house.  [He 
turns  towards  tlie  inner  door,  having  left  his  cap  in  the  bed- 
room]. 

Hypatia  [standing  in  his  way]  Are  you  ashamed  of  hav- 
ing said  "Damn  you"  to  me? 

Percival.  I  had  no  right  to  say  it.  I'm  very  much 
ashamed  of  it.     I  have  already  begged  your  pardon. 


Misalliance  63 

Htpatia.  And  youre  not  ashamed  of  having  said 
"Really,  Miss  Tarleton." 

Percival.    Why  should  I? 

Hypatia.  0  man,  man!  mean,  stupid,  cowardly, 
selfish  masculine  male  man!  You  ought  to  have  been  a 
governess.  I  was  expelled  from  school  for  saying  that 
the  very  next  person  that  said  "Really,  Miss  Tarleton," 
to  me,  I  would  strike  her  across  the  face.  You  were  the 
next. 

Percival.  I  had  no  intention  of  being  offensive.  Surely 
there  is  nothing  that  can  wound  any  lady  in — [He  hesi- 
tates, not  quite  convinced].  At  least — er — I  really  didnt 
mean  to  be  disagreeable. 

Hypatia.   Liar. 

Percival.  Of  course  if  youre  going  to  insult  me,  I  am 
quite  helpless.  Youre  a  woman:  you  can  say  what  you 
like. 

Hypatia.  And  you  can  only  say  what  you  dare.  Poor 
wretch:  it  isnt  much.  [He  bites  his  lip,  and  sits  down,  very 
much  annoyed].  Really,  Mr  Percival!  You  sit  down  in  the 
presence  of  a  lady  and  leave  her  standing.  [He  rises 
hastily].  Ha,  ha!  Really,  Mr  Percival!  Oh  really,  really, 
really,  really,  really,  Mr  Percival!  How  do  you  like  it? 
Wouldnt  you  rather  I  damned  you? 

Percival.    Miss  Tarleton — 

Hypatia  [caressingly]  Hypatia,  [Joey.  Patsy,  if  you 
like. 

Percival.  Look  here:  this  is  no  good.  You  want  to  do 
what  you  like? 

Hypatia.    Dont  you? 

Percival.  No.  Ive  been  too  well  brought  up.  Ive 
argued  all  through  this  thing;  and  I  tell  you  I'm  not  pre- 
pared to  cast  off  the  social  bond.  It's  like  a  corset:  it's  a 
support  to  the  figure  even  if  it  does  squeeze  and  deform  it 
a  bit.    I  want  to  be  free. 

Hypatia.    Well,  I'm  tempting  you  to  be  free. 


64  Misalliance 

Percival.  Not  at  all.  Freedom,  my  good  girl,  means 
being  able  to  count  on  how  other  people  will  behave.  If 
every  man  who  dislikes  me  is  to  throw  a  handful  of  mud 
in  my  face,  and  every  woman  who  likes  me  is  to  behave 
like  Potiphar's  wife,  then  I  shall  be  a  slave:  the  slave  of 
uncertainty:  the  slave  of  fear:  the  worst  of  all  slaveries. 
How  would  you  like  it  if  every  laborer  you  met  in  the 
road  were  to  make  love  to  you?  No.  Give  me  the  blessed 
protection  of  a  good  stiff  conventionality  among  thor- 
oughly well-brought  up  ladies  and  gentlemen. 

Hypatia.    Another  talker!     Men  like  conventions  be- 
cause men  made  them.     I  didnt  make  them:    I  dont  like 
them:   I  wont  keep  them.     Now,  what  will  you  do? 
'  v  Percival.    Bolt.     [He  runs  out  through  the  pavilion]. 

Hypatia.    I'll  catch  you.     [She  dashes  off  in  pursuit]. 

During  this  conversation  the  head  of  the  scandalized  man  in 
the  Turkish  bath  has  repeatedly  risen  from  the  lunette,  with  a 
strong  expression  of  moral  shock.  It  vanishes  abruptly  as  the 
two  turn  towards  it  in  their  flight.  At  the  same  moment 
Tarleton  comes  back  through  the  vestibule  door,  exhausted  by 
severe  and  unaccustomed  exercise. 

Tarleton  [looking  after  the  flying  figures  with  amazement] 
Hallo,  Patsy:  whats  up?  Another  aeroplane?  [They  are 
far  too  preoccupied  to  hear  him;  and  he  is  left  staring  after 
them  as  they  rush  away  through  the  garden.  He  goes  to  the 
pavilion  door  and  looks  up;  but  the  heavens  are  empty.  His 
exhaustion  disables  him  from  further  inquiry.  He  dabs  his 
brow  with  his  handkerchief,  and  walks  stiffly  to  the  nearest 
convenient  support,  which  happens  to  be  the  Turkish  bath. 
He  props  himself  upon  it  with  his  elbow,  and  covers  his  eyes 
with  his  hand  for  a  moment.  After  a  few  sighing  breaths,  he 
feels  a  little  better,  and  uncovers  his  eyes.  The  man's  head 
rises  from  the  lunette  a  few  inches  from  his  nose.  He  recoils 
from  the  bath  with  a  violent  start].  Oh  Lord!  My  brain's 
gone.  [Calling  piteously]  Chickabiddy!  [He  staggers  down 
to  the  writing  table]. 


Misalliance  65 

The  Man  [coming  out  of  the  bath,  pistol  in  hand]  Another 
sound;    and  youre  a  dead  man. 

Tarleton  [braced]  Am  I?  Well,  youre  a  live  one: 
thats  one  comfort.  I  thought  you  were  a  ghost.  [lie  sits 
down,  quite  undisturbed  by  the  pistol]  Who  are  you;  and 
what  the  devil  were  you  doing  in  my  new  Turkish  bath? 

The  Man  [with  tragic  intensity]  I  am  the  son  of  Lucinda 
Titmus. 

Tarleton  [the  name  conveying  nothing  to  him]  Indeed? 
And  how  is  she?     Quite  well,  I  hope,  eh? 

The  Man.  She  is  dead.  Dead,  my  God!  and  youre 
alive. 

Tarleton  [unimpressed  by  the  tragedy,  but  sympathetic] 
Oh!  Lost  your  mother?  Thats  sad.  I'm  sorry.  But  we 
cant  all  have  the  luck  to  survive  our  mothers,  and  be  nursed 
out  of  the  world  by  the  hands  that  nursed  us  into  it. 

The  Man.    Much  you  care,  damn  you! 

Tarleton.  Oh,  dont  cut  up  rough.  Face  it  like  a  man. 
You  see  I  didnt  know  your  mother;  but  Ive  no  doubt  she 
was  an  excellent  woman. 

The  Man.  Not  know  her!  Do  you  dare  to  stand  there 
by  her  open  grave  and  deny  that  you  knew  her? 

Tarleton  [trying  to  recollect]  What  did  you  say  her 
name  was? 

The  Man.    Lucinda  Titmus. 

Tarleton.  Well,  I  ought  to  remember  a  rum  name  like 
that  if  I  ever  heard  it.  But  I  dont.  Have  you  a  photo- 
graph or  anything? 

The  Man.    Forgotten  even  the  name  of  your  victim! 

Tarleton.    Oh!   she  was  my  victim,  was  she? 

The  Man.  She  was.  And  you  shall  see  her  face  again 
before  you  die,  dead  as  she  is.     I  have  a  photograph. 

Tarleton.    Good. 

The  Man.    Ive  two  photographs. 

Tarleton.  Still  better.  Treasure  the  mother's  pic- 
tures.    Good  boy! 


66  Misalliance 

The  Man.  One  of  them  as  you  knew  her.  The  other  as 
she  became  when  you  flung  her  aside,  and  she  withered 
into  an  old  woman. 

Tarleton.  She'd  have  done  that  anyhow,  my  lad.  We 
all  grow  old.  Look  at  me!  [Seeing  that  the  man  is  embar- 
rassed by  his  pistol  in  fumbling  for  the  photographs  with 
his  left  hand  in  his  breast  pocket]  Let  me  hold  the  gun  for 
you. 

The  Man  [retreating  to  the  worlctable]  Stand  back.  Do 
you  take  me  for  a  fool? 

Tarleton.  Well,  youre  a  little  upset,  naturally.  It 
does  you  credit. 

The  Man.  Look  here,  upon  this  picture  and  on  this. 
[He  holds  out  the  two  photographs  like  a  hand  at  cards,  and 
points  to  them  with  the  pistol}. 

Tarleton.  Good.  Read  Shakespear:  he  has  a  word  for 
every  occasion.  [He  takes  the  photographs,  one  in  each  hand, 
and  looks  from  one  to  the  other,  pleased  and  interested,  but 
without  any  sign  of  recognition]  What  a  pretty  girl !  Very 
pretty.  I  can  imagine  myself  falling  in  love  with  her  when 
I  was  your  age.  I  wasnt  a  bad-looking  young  fellow  myself 
in  those  days.  [Looking  at  the  other]  Curious  that  we 
should  both  have  gone  the  same  way. 

The  Man.  You  and  she  the  same  way!  What  do  you 
mean? 

Tarleton.    Both  got  stout,  I  mean. 

The  Man.    Would  you  have  had  her  deny  herself  food? 

Tarleton.  No:  it  wouldnt  have  been  any  use.  It's 
constitutional.  No  matter  how  little  you  eat  you  put  on 
flesh  if  youre  made  that  way.  [He  resumes  his  study  of  the 
earlier  photograph}. 

The  Man.  Is  that  all  the  feeling  that  rises  in  you  at  the 
sight  of  the  face  you  once  knew  so  well? 

Tarleton  [too  much  absorbed  in  the  portrait  to  heed  him] 
Funny  that  I  cant  remember!  Let  this  be  a  lesson  to  you, 
young  man.     I  could  go  into  court  tomorrow  and  swear 


Misalliance  67 

I  never  saw  that  face  before  in  my  life  if  it  wasnt  for  that 
brooch  ['pointing  to  the  photograph].  Have  you  got  that 
brooch,  by  the  way?  [The  man  again  resorts  to  his  breast 
pocket}.  You  seem  to  carry  the  whole  family  property  in 
that  pocket. 

The  Man  [producing  a  brooch]  Here  it  is  to  prove  my 
bona  fides. 

Tarleton  [pensively  putting  the  photographs  on  the  table 
and  taking  the  brooch]  I  bought  that  brooch  in  Cheapside 
from  a  man  with  a  yellow  wig  and  a  cast  in  his  left  eye. 
Ive  never  set  eyes  on  him  from  that  day  to  this.  And  yet 
I  remember  that  man;   and  I  cant  remember  your  mother. 

The  Man.  Monster!  Without  conscience!  without 
even  memory!     You  left  her  to  her  shame — 

Tarleton  [throwing  the  brooch  on  the  table  and  rising 
pepperily]  Come,  come,  young  man!  none  of  that.  Re- 
spect the  romance  of  your  mother's  youth.  Dont  you 
start  throwing  stones  at  her.  I  dont  recall  her  features  just 
at  this  moment;  but  Ive  no  doubt  she  was  kind  to  me  and 
we  were  happy  together.  If  you  have  a  word  to  say  against 
her,  take  yourself  out  of  my  house  and  say  it  elsewhere. 

The  Man.  What  sort  of  a  joker  are  you?  Are  you  try- 
ing to  put  me  in  the  wrong,  when  you  have  to  answer  to 
me  for  a  crime  that  would  make  every  honest  man  spit  at 
you  as  you  passed  in  the  street  if  I  were  to  make  it  known? 

Tarleton.    You  read  a  good  deal,  dont  you? 

The  Man.  What  if  I  do?  What  has  that  to  do  with 
your  infamy  and  my  mother's  doom? 

Tarleton.  There,  you  see!  Doom!  Thats  not  good 
sense;  but  it's  literature.  Now  it  happens  that  I'm  a  tre- 
mendous reader:  always  was.  When  I  was  your  age  I 
read  books  of  that  sort  by  the  bushel:  the  Doom  sort,  you 
know.  It's  odd,  isnt  it,  that  you  and  I  should  be  like  one 
another  in  that  respect?  Can  you  account  for  it  in  any 
way? 

The  Man.    No.     What  are  you  driving  at? 


68  Misalliance 

Tarleton.    Well,  do  you  know  who  your  father  was? 

The  Man.  I  see  what  you  mean  now.  You  dare  set  up 
to  be  my  father.  Thank  heaven  Ive  not  a  drop  of  your 
vile  blood  in  my  veins. 

Tarleton  [sitting  down  again  with  a  shrug]  Well,  if  you 
wont  be  civil,  theres  no  pleasure  in  talking  to  you,  is  there? 
What  do  you  want?     Money? 

The  Man.    How  dare  you  insult  me? 

Tarleton.    Well,  what  do  you  want? 

The  Man.    Justice. 

Tarleton.    Youre  quite  sure  thats  all? 

The  Man.    It's  enough  for  me. 

Tarleton.  A  modest  sort  of  demand,  isnt  it?  Nobody 
■ever  had  it  since  the  world  began,  fortunately  for  them- 
selves; but  you  must  have  it,  must  you?  Well,  youve 
come  to  the  wrong  shop  for  it:  youll  get  no  justice  here: 
we  dont  keep  it.     Human  nature  is  what  we  stock. 

The  Man.  Human  nature!  Debauchery!  gluttony! 
selfishness!  robbery  of  the  poor!  Is  that  what  you  call 
human  nature? 

Tarleton.  No:  thats  what  y  o u  call  it.  Come,  my  lad! 
Whats  the  matter  with  you?  You  dont  look  starved; 
and  youve  a  decent  suit  of  clothes. 

The  Man.    Forty-two  shillings. 

Tarleton.  They  can  do  you  a  very  decent  suit  for 
forty-two  shillings.     Have  you  paid  for  it? 

The  Man.  Do  you  take  me  for  a  thief?  And  do  you 
suppose  I  can  get  credit  like  you? 

Tarleton.  Then  you  were  able  to  lay  your  hand  on 
forty-two  shillings.  Judging  from  your  conversational 
style,  I  should  think  you  must  spend  at  least  a  shilling  a 
week  on  romantic  literature. 

The  Man.  Where  would  I  get  a  shilling  a  week  to  spend 
on  books  when  I  can  hardly  keep  myself  decent?  I  get 
books  at  the  Free  Library. 

Tarleton  [springing  to  his  feet]    What ! ! ! 


Misalliance  69 

The  Man  [recoiling  before  his  vehemence]  The  Free 
Library.     Theres  no  harm  in  that. 

Tarleton.  Ingrate!  I  supply  you  with  free  books;  and 
the  use  you  make  of  them  is  to  persuade  yourself  that  it's 
a  fine  thing  to  shoot  me.  [He  throws  himself  doggedly  back 
into  his  chair].  I'll  never  give  another  penny  to  a  Free 
Library. 

The  Man.  Youll  never  give  another  penny  to  any- 
thing.    This  is  the  end:   for  you  and  me. 

Tarleton.  Pooh!  Come,  come,  man!  talk  business. 
Whats  wrong?     Are  you  out  of  employment? 

The  Man.  No.  This  is  my  Saturday  afternoon.  Dont 
flatter  yourself  that  I'm  a  loafer  or  a  criminal.  I'm  a 
cashier;  and  I  defy  you  to  say  that  my  cash  has  ever  been 
a  farthing  wrong.  Ive  a  right  to  call  you  to  account  be- 
cause my  hands  are  clean. 

Tarleton.  Well,  call  away.  What  have  I  to  account 
for?  Had  you  a  hard  time  with  your  mother?  Why  didnt 
she  ask  me  for  money? 

The  Man.  She'd  have  died  first.  Besides,  who  wanted 
your  money?  Do  you  suppose  we  lived  in  the  gutter?  My 
father  maynt  have  been  in  as  large  a  way  as  you;  but  he 
was  better  connected;  and  his  shop  was  as  respectable  as 
yours. 

Tarleton.  I  suppose  your  mother  brought  him  a  little 
capital. 

The  Man.  I  dont  know.  Whats  that  got  to  do  with 
you? 

Tarleton.  Well,  you  say  she  and  I  knew  one  another 
and  parted.  She  must  have  had  something  off  me  then, 
you  know.  One  doesnt  get  out  of  these  things  for  nothing. 
Hang  it,  young  man:  do  you  suppose  Ive  no  heart?  Of 
course  she  had  her  due;  and  she  found  a  husband  with  it, 
and  set  him  up  in  business  with  it,  and  brought  you  up 
respectably;    so  what  the  devil  have  you  to  complain  of? 

The  Man.    Are  women  to  be  ruined  with  impunity? 


70  Misalliance 

Tarleton.  I  havnt  ruined  any  woman  that  I'm  aware 
of.     Ive  been  the'  making  of  you  and  your  mother. 

The  Man.  Oh,  I'm  a  fool  to  listen  to  you  and  argue 
with  you.    I  came  here  to  kill  you  and  then  kill  myself. 

Tarleton.  Begin  with  yourself,  if  you  dont  mind. 
Ive  a  good  deal  of  business  to  do  still  before  I  die.  Ha?vnt 
you? 

The  Man.  No.  Thats  just  it:  Ive  no  business  to  do. 
Do  you  know  what  my  life  is?  I  spend  my  days  from 
nine  to  six — nine  hours  of  daylight  and  fresh  air — in  a 
stuffy  little  den  counting  another  man's  money.  Ive  an 
intellect:  a  mind  and  a  brain  and  a  soul;  and  the  use  he 
makes  of  them  is  to  fix  them  on  his  tuppences  and  his 
eighteenpences  and  his  two  pound  seventeen  and  tenpences 
and  see  how  much  they  come  to  at  the  end  of  the  day 
and  take  care  that  no  one  steals  them.  I  enter  and  enter, 
and  add  and  add,  and  take  money  and  give  change,  and 
fill  cheques  and  stamp  receipts;  and  not  a  penny  of  that 
money  is  my  own:  not  one  of  those  transactions  has  the 
smallest  interest  for  me  or  anyone  else  in  the  world  but 
him;  and  even  he  couldnt  stand  it  if  he  had  to  do  it  all 
himself.  And  I'm  envied:  aye,  envied  for  the  variety  and 
liveliness  of  my  job,  by  the  poor  devil  of  a  bookkeeper 
that  has  to  copy  all  my  entries  over  again.  Fifty  thousand 
entries  a  year  that  poor  wretch  makes;  and  not  ten  out 
of  the  fifty  thousand  ever  has  to  be  referred  to  again;  and 
when  all  the  figures  are  counted  up  and  the  balance  sheet 
made  out,  the  boss  isnt  a  penny  the  richer  than  he'd  be  if 
bookkeeping  had  never  been  invented.  Of  all  the  dam- 
nable waste  of  human  life  that  ever  was  invented,  clerking 
is  the  very  worst. 

Tarleton.    Why  not  join  the  territorials? 

The  Man.  Because  I  shouldnt  be  let.  He  hasnt  even 
the  sense  to  see  that  it  would  pay  him  to  get  some  cheap 
soldiering  out  of  me.  How  can  a  man  tied  to  a  desk  from 
nine  to  six  be  anything — be  even  a  man,  let  alone  a  sol- 


Misalliance  71 

dier?  But  I'll  teach  him  and  you  a  lesson.  Ive  had 
enough  of  living  a  dog's  life  and  despising  myself  for  it. 
Ive  had  enough  of  being  talked  down  to  by  hogs  like  you, 
and  wearing  my  life  out  for  a  salary  that  wouldnt  keep  you 
in  cigars.  Youll  never  tbelieve  that  a  clerk's  a  man  until 
one  of  us  makes  an  example  of  one  of  you. 

Tarleton.    Despotism  tempered  by  assassination,  eh? 

The  Man.  Yes.  Thats  what  they  do  in  Russia.  Well,  a 
business  office  is  Russia  as  far  as  the  clerks  are  concerned. 
So  dont  you  take  it  so  coolly.  You  think  I'm  not  going  to 
do  it;    but  I  am. 

Tarleton  [rising  and  facing  him]  Come,  now,  as  man 
to  man!  It's  not  my  fault  that  youre  poorer  than  I  am; 
and  it's  not  your  fault  that  I'm  richer  than  you.  And  if 
you  could  undo  all  that  passed  between  me  and  your 
mother,  you  wouldnt  undo  it;  and  neither  would  she.  But 
youre  sick  of  your  slavery;  and  you  want  to  be  the  hero  of 
a  romance  and  to  get  into  the  papers.  Eh?  A  son  revenges 
his  mother's  shame.  Villain  weltering  in  his  gore.  Mother: 
look  down  from  heaven  and  receive  your  unhappy  son's 
last  sigh. 

The  Man.  Oh,  rot!  do  you  think  I  read  novelettes? 
And  do  you  suppose  I  believe  such  superstitions  as 
heaven?  I  go  to  church  because  the  boss  told  me  I'd  get 
the  sack  if  I  didnt.  Free  England!  Ha!  [Lina  appears  at 
the  pavilion  door,  and  comes  swiftly  and  noiselessly  forward 
on  seeing  the  man  with  a  pistol  in  his  hand]. 

Tarleton.  Youre  afraid  of  getting  the  sack;  but 
youre  not  afraid  to  shoot  yourself. 

The  Man.  Damn  you!  youre  trying  to  keep  me  talking 
until  somebody  comes.  [He  raises  the  pistol  desperately,  but 
not  very  resolutely]. 

Lina  [at  his  right  elbow]    Somebody  has  come. 

The  Man  [turning  on  her]  Stand  off.  I'll  shoot  you  if 
you  lay  a  hand  on  me.    I  will,  by  God. 

Lina.    You  cant  cover  me  with  that  pistol.    Try. 


72  Misalliance 

He  tries,  presenting  the  pistol  at  her  face.  She  moves  round 
him  in  the  opposite  direction  to  the  hands  of  a  clock  with  a  light 
dancing  step.  He  finds  it  impossible  to  cover  her  with  the 
pistol:  she  is  always  too  far  to  his  left.  Tarleton,  behind  him, 
grips  his  wrist  and  drags  his  arm  straight  up,  so  that  the  pistol 
points  to  the  ceiling.  As  he  tries  to  turn  on  his  assailant,  Lina 
grips  his  other  wrist. 

Lina.  Please  stop.  I  cant  bear  to  twist  anyone's  wrist; 
but  I  must  if  you  dont  let  the  pistol  go. 

The  Man  [letting  Tarleton  take  it  from  him]  All  right: 
I'm  done.  Couldnt  even  do  that  job  decently.  Thats  a 
clerk  all  over.  Very  well:  send  for  your  damned  police 
and  make  an  end  of  it.  I'm  accustomed  to  prison  from  nine 
to  six:   I  daresay  I  can  stand  it  from  six  to  nine  as  well. 

Tarleton.  Dont  swear.  Thats  a  lady.  [He  throws  the 
pistol  on  the  writing  table}. 

The  Man  [looking  at  Lina  in  amazement]  Beaten  by  a 
female!  It  needed  only  this.  [He  collapses  in  the  chair 
near  the  worktable,  and  hides  his  face.  They  cannot  help 
pitying  him]. 

Lina.  Old  pal:  dont  call  the  police.  Lend  him  a  bicycle 
and  let  him  get  away. 

The  Man.  I  cant  ride  a  bicycle.  I  never  could  afford 
one.     I'm  not  even  that  much  good. 

Tarleton.  If  I  gave  you  a  hundred  pound  note  now  to 
go  and  have  a  good  spree  with,  I  wonder  would  you  know 
how  to  set  about  it.    Do  you  ever  take  a  holiday? 

The  Man.    Take!    I  got  four  days  last  August. 

Tarleton.    What  did  you  do? 

The  Man.  I  did  a  cheap  trip  to  Folkestone.  I  spent 
sevenpence  on  dropping  pennies  into  silly  automatic  ma- 
chines and  peepshows  of  rowdy  girls  having  a  jolly  time. 
I  spent  a  penny  on  the  lift  and  fourpence  on  refreshments. 
That  cleaned  me  out.  The  rest  of  the  time  I  was  so  miser- 
able that  I  was  glad  to  get  back  to  the  office.  Now  you 
know. 


Misalliance  73 

Lina.  Come  to  the  gymnasium:  I'll  teach  you  how  to 
make  a  man  of  yourself.  [The  man  is  about  to  rise  irreso- 
lutely, from  the  mere  habit  of  doing  what  he  is  told,  when 
Tarleton  stops  him]. 

Tarleton.  Young  man:  dont.  Youve  tried  to  shoot 
me;  but  I'm  not  vindictive.  I  draw  the  line  at  putting  a 
man  on  the  rack.  If  you  want  every  joint  in  your  body 
stretched  until  it's  an  agony  to  live — until  you  have  an 
unnatural  feeling  that  all  your  muscles  are  singing  and 
laughing  with  pain — then  go  to  the  gymnasium  with  that 
lady.     But  youll  be  more  comfortable  in  jail. 

Lina  [greatly  amused]  Was  that  why  you  went  away, 
old  pal?  Was  that  the  telegram  you  said  you  had  for- 
gotten to  send? 

Mrs  Tarleton  comes  in  hastily  through  the  inner  door. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [on  the  steps]  Is  anything  the  matter, 
John?  Nurse  says  she  heard  you  calling  me  a  quarter  of 
an  hour  ago;  and  that  your  voice  sounded  as  if  you  were 
ill.  [She  comes  between  Tarleton  and  the  man.]  Is  anything 
the  matter? 

Tarleton.  This  is  the  son  of  an  old  friend  of  mine. 
Mr — er — Mr  Gunner.  [To  the  man,  who  rises  awkwardly]. 
My  wife.  ' 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Good  evening  to  you. 

Gunner.  Er —  [He  is  too  nervous  to  speak,  and  makes  a 
shambling  bow]. 

Bentley  looks  in  at  the  pavilion  door,  very  peevish,  and  too 
preoccupied  with  his  own  affairs  to  pay  any  attention  to  those 
of  the  company. 

Bentley.  I  say:  has  anybody  seen  Hypatia?  She 
promised  to  come  out  with  me;  and  I  cant  find  her  any- 
where.    And  wheres  Joey? 

Gunner  [suddenly  breaking  out  aggressively,  being  inca- 
pable of  any  middle  way  between  submissiveness  and  vio- 
lence] I  can  tell  you  where  Hypatia  is.  I  can  tell  you 
where  Joey  is.    And  I  say  it's  a  scandal  and  an  infamy.    If 


74  Misalliance 

people  only  knew  what  goes  on  in  this  so-called  respectable 
house  it  would  be  put  a  stop  to.  These  are  the  morals  of  our 
pious  capitalist  class!  This  is  your  rotten  bourgeoisie! 
This!  — 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Dont  you  dare  use  such  language  in 
company.     I  wont  allow  it. 

Tarleton.  All  right,  Chickabiddy:  it's  not  bad  lan- 
guage:   it's  only  Socialism. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Well,  I  wont  have  any  Socialism  in  my 
house. 

Tarleton  [to  Gunner]  You  hear  what  Mrs  Tarleton 
says.  Well,  in  this  house  everybody  does  what  she  says 
or  out  they  go. 

Gunner.  Do  you  suppose  I  want  to  stay?  Do  you  think 
I  would  breathe  this  polluted  atmosphere  a  moment  longer 
than  I  could  help? 

Bentley  [running  forward  between  Lina  and  Gunner]  But 
what  did  you  mean  by  what  you  said  about  Miss  Tarleton 
and  Mr  Percival,  you  beastly  rotter,  you? 

Gunner  [to  Tarleton]  Oh!  is  Hypatia  your  daughter? 
And  Joey  is  Mister  Percival,  is  he?  One  of  your 
set,  I  suppose.  One  of  the  smart  set!  One  of  the 
bridge-playing,  eighty-horse-power,  week-ender  set!  One 
of  the  johnnies  I  slave  for!  Well,  Joey  has  more  de- 
cency than  your  daughter,  anyhow.  The  women  are 
the  worst.  I  never  believed  it  til  I  saw  it  with  my 
own  eyes.  Well,  it  wont  last  for  ever.  The  writing  is 
on  the  wall.  Rome  fell.  Babylon  fell.  Hindhead's  turn 
will  come. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [naively  looking  at  the  wall  for  the  writing] 
Whatever  are  you  talking  about,  young  man? 

Gunner.  I  know  what  I'm  talking  about.  I  went  into 
that  Turkish  bath  a  boy:   I  came  out  a  man. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Good  gracious!  hes  mad.  [To  Lina] 
Did  John  make  him  take  a  Turkish  bath? 

Lina.    No.    He  doesnt  need  Turkish  baths:  he  needs  to 


Misalliance  75 

put  on  a  little  flesh.  I  dont  understand  what  it's  all  about. 
I  found  him  trying  to  shoot  Mr  Tarleton. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [with  a  scream]  Oh!  and  John  encourag- 
ing him,  I'll  be  bound!  Bunny:  you  go  for  the  police.  [To 
Gunner]  I'll  teach  you  to  Come  into  my  house  and  shoot 
my  husband. 

Gunner.  Teach  away.  I  never  asked  to  be  let  off.  I'm 
ashamed  to  be  free  instead  of  taking  my  part  with  the 
rest.  Women — beautiful  women  of  noble  birth — are  going 
to  prison  for  their  opinions.  Girl  students  in  Russia  go 
to  the  gallows;  let  themselves  be  cut  in  pieces  with  the 
knout,  or  driven  through  the  frozen  snows  of  Siberia, 
sooner  than  stand  looking  on  tamely  at  the  world  being 
made  a  hell  for  the  toiling  millions.  If  you  were  not  all 
skunks  and  cowards  youd  be  suffering  with  tbem  instead 
of  battening  here  on  the  plunder  of  the  poor. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [much  vexed]  Oh,  did  you  ever  hear 
such  silly  nonsense?  Bunny:  go  and  tell  the  gardener  to 
send  over  one  of  his  men  to  Grayshott  for  the  police. 

Gunner.  I'll  go  with  him.  I  intend  to  give  myself  up. 
I'm  going  to  expose  what  Ive  seen  here,  no  matter  what 
the  consequences  may  be  to  my  miserable  self. 

Tarleton.  Stop.  You  stay  where  you  are,  Ben.  Chick- 
abiddy :  you  ve  never  had  the  police  in.  If  you  had,  youd  not 
be  in  a  hurry  to  have  them  in  again.  Now,  young  man:  cut 
the  cackle;  and  tell  us,  as  short  as  you  can,  whatdidyou  see? 

Gunner.    I  cant  tell  you  in  the  presence  of  ladies. 

Mrs  Tarleton  Oh,  you  are  tiresome.  As  if  it  mat- 
tered to  anyone  what  you  saw.  Me!  A  married  woman 
that  might  be  your  mother.  [To  Lina]  And  I'm  sure 
youre  not  particular,  if  youll  excuse  my  saying  so. 

Tarleton.    Out  with  it.     What  did  you  see? 

Gunner.  I  saw  your  daughter  with  my  own  eyes — oh 
well,  never  mind  what  I  saw. 

Bentley  [almost  crying  with  anxiety]  You  beastly  rotter, 
I'll  get  Joey  to  give  you  such  a  hiding — 


76  Misalliance 

Tarleton.  You  cant  leave  it  at  that,  you  know.  What 
did  you  see  my  daughter  doing? 

Gunner.  After  all,  why  shouldnt  she  do  it?  The 
Russian  students  do  it.  Women  should  be  as  free  as 
men.  I'm  a  fool.  I'm  so  full  of  your  bourgeois  morality 
that  I  let  myself  be  shocked  by  the  application  of  my 
own  revolutionary  principles.  If  she  likes  the  man  why 
shouldnt  she  tell  him  so? 

Mrs  Tarleton.  I  do  wonder  at  you,  John,  letting  him 
talk  like  this  before  everybody.  [Turning  rather  tartly  to 
Lina]  Would  you  mind  going  away  to  the  drawing-room 
just  for  a  few  minutes,  Miss  Chipenoska.  This  is  a  private 
family  matter,  if  you  dont  mind. 

Lina.  I  should  have  gone  before,  Mrs  Tarleton,  if  there 
had  been  anyone  to  protect  Mr  Tarleton  and  the  young 
gentleman. 

Tarleton.  Youre  quite  right,  Miss  Lina:  you  must 
stand  by.  I  could  have  tackled  him  this  morning;  but 
since  you  put  me  through  those  exercises  I'd  rather  die 
than  even  shake  hands  with  a  man,  much  less  fight  him. 

Gunner.  It's  all  of  a  piece  here.  The  men  effeminate, 
the  women  unsexed — 

Tarleton.  Dont  begin  again,  old  chap.  Keep  it  for 
Trafalgar  Square. 

Hypatia's  Voice  Outside.  No,  no.  [She  breaks  off  in  a 
stifled  half  laugh,  half  scream,  and  is  seen  darting  across  the 
garden  xoith  Percival  in  hot  pursuit.  Immediately  afterioards 
she  appears  again,  and  runs  into  the  pavilion.  Finding  it 
fidl  of  people,  including  a  stranger,  she  stops;  but  Percival, 
flushed  and  reckless,  rushes  in  and  seizes  her  before  he,  too, 
realizes  that  they  are  not  alone.    He  releases  her  in  confusion]. 

Dead  silence.  They  are  all  afraid  to  look  at  one  another 
except  Mrs  Tarleton,  who  stares  sternly  at  Hypatia.  Hy- 
patia  is  the  first  to  recover  her  presence  of  mind. 

Hypatia.  Excuse  me  rushing  in  like  this.  Mr  Percival 
has  been  chasing  me  down  the  hill. 


Misalliance  77 

Gunner.  Who  chased  him  up  it?  Dont  be  ashamed. 
Be  fearless.     Be  truthful. 

Tarleton.  Gunner:  will  you  go  to  Paris  for  a  fort- 
night?    I'll  pay  your  expenses. 

Hypatia.    What  do  you  mean? 

Gunner.  There  was  a  silent  witness  in  the  Turkish 
bath. 

Tarleton.  I  found  him  hiding  there.  Whatever  went 
on  here,  he  saw  and  heard.     Thats  what  he  means. 

Percival  [sternly  approaching  Gunner,  and  speaking  with 
deep  but  contained  indignation]  Am  I  to  understand  you  as 
daring  to  put  forward  the  monstrous  and  blackguardly  lie 
that  this  lady  behaved  improperly  in  my  presence? 

Gunner  [turning  white]  You  know  what  I  saw  and 
heard. 

Hypatia,  with  a  gleam  of  triumph  in  her  eyes,  slips  noise- 
lessly into  the  suring  chair,  and  watches  Percival  and  Gunner, 
swinging  slightly,  but  otherwise  motionless. 

Percival.  I  hope  it  is  not  necessary  for  me  to  assure 
you  all  that  there  is  not  one  word  of  truth — not  one  grain 
of  substance — in  this  rascally  calumny,  which  no  man  with 
a  spark  of  decent  feeling  would  have  uttered  even  if  he 
had  been  ignorant  enough  to  believe  it.  Miss  Tarleton's 
conduct,  since  I  have  had  the  honor  of  knowing  her,  has 
been,  I  need  hardly  say,  in  every  respect  beyond  reproach. 
[To  Gunner]  As  for  you,  sir,  youll  have  the  goodness  to 
come  out  with  me  immediately.  I  have  some  business 
with  you  which  cant  be  settled  in  Mrs  Tarleton's  presence 
or  in  her  house. 

Gunner  [painfully  frightened]  Why  should  I  go  out 
with  you? 

Percival.    Because  I  intend  that  you  shall. 

Gunner.  I  wont  be  bullied  by  you.  [Percival  makes  a 
threatening  step  towards  him].  Police!  [He  tries  to  bolt;  but 
Percival  seizes  him].  Leave  me  go,  will  you?  What  right 
have  you  to  lay  hands  on  me? 


78  Misalliance 

Tarleton.  Let  hirn  run  for  it,  Mr  Percival.  Hes  very 
poor  company.  We  shall  be  well  rid  of  him.  Let  him 
go. 

Percival.  Not  until  he  has  taken  back  and  made  the 
fullest  apology  for  the  abominable  lie  he  has  told.  He  shall 
do  that  or  he  shall  defend  himself  as  best  he  can  against  the 
most  thorough  thrashing  I'm  capable  of  giving  him.  [Re- 
leasing Gunner,  but  facing  him  ominously]  Take  your  choice. 
Which  is  it  to  be? 

Gunner.  Give  me  a  fair  chance.  Go  and  stick  at  a 
desk  from  nine  to  six  for  a  month,  and  let  me  have  your 
grub  and  your  sport  and  your  lessons  in  boxing,  and  I'll 
fight  you  fast  enough.  You  know  I'm  no  good  or  you 
darent  bully  me  like  this. 

Percival.  You  should  have  thought  of  that  before  you 
attacked  a  lady  with  a  dastardly  slander.  I'm  waiting  for 
your  decision.     I'm  rather  in  a  hurry,  please. 

Gunner.    I  never  said  anything  against  the  lady. 


Mrs  Tarleton 
Bentley 
Hypatia 
Tarleton 


Oh,  listen  to  that! 
What  a  liar! 
Oh! 

Oh,  come! 

Percival.  We'll  have  it  in  writing,  if  you  dont  mind. 
[Pointing  to  the  writing  table]  Sit  down;  and  take  that  pen 
in  your  hand.  [Gunner  looks  irresolutely  a  little  way  round; 
then  obeys].     Now  write.     "I,"  whatever  your  name  is — 

Gunner  [after  a  vain  attempt]  I  cant.  My  hand's  shak- 
ing too  much.  You  see  it's  no  use.  I'm  doing  my  best. 
I  cant. 

Percival.  Mr  Summerhays  will  write  it:  you  can 
sign  it. 

Bentley  [insolently  to  Gunner]  Get  up.     [Gunner  obeys; 
and  Bentley,  shouldering  him  aside  towards\  Percival,  takes 
his  place  and  prepares  to  write]. 
Percival.    Whats  your  name? 
Gunner.    John  Brown. 


Misalliance  79 

Tarleton.  Oh  come!  Couldnt  you  make  it  Horace 
Smith?    or  Algernon  Robinson? 

Gunner  [agitatedly]  But  my  name  is  John  Brown. 
There  are  really  John  Browns.  How  can  I  help  it  if  my 
name's  a  common  one? 

Bentley.    Shew  us  a  letter  addressed  to  you. 

Gunner.  How  can  I?  I  never  get  any  letters:  I'm  only 
a  clerk.  I  can  shew  you  J.  B.  on  my  handkerchief.  [He 
takes  out  a  not  very  clean  one]. 

Bentley  [with  disgust]  Oh,  put  it  up  again.  Let  it  go  at 
John  Brown. 

Percival.    Where  do  you  live? 

Gunner.  4  Chesterfield  Parade,  Kentish  Town, 
N.W. 

Percival  [dictating]  I,  John  Brown,  of  4  Chesterfield 
Parade,  Kentish  Town,  do  hereby  voluntarily  confess  that 
on  the  31st  May  1909  I—  [To  Tarleton]  What  did  he  do 
exactly? 

Tarleton  [dictating] — I  trespassed  on  the  land  of  John 
Tarleton  at  Hindhead,  and  effected  an  unlawful  entry  into 
his  house,  where  I  secreted  myself  in  a  portable  Turkish 
bath — 

Bentley.  Go  slow,  old  man.  Just  a  moment.  "Turk- 
ish bath" — yes? 

Tarleton  [continuing] — with  a  pistol,  with  which  I 
threatened  to  take  the  life  of  the  said  John  Tarleton — 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  John!  You  might  have  been 
killed. 

Tarleton.  — and  was  prevented  from  doing  so  only  by 
the  timely  arrival  of  the  celebrated  Miss  Lina  Szczepa- 
nowska. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Is  she  celebrated?  [Apologetically]  I 
never  dreamt — 

Bentley.  Look  here:  I'm  awfully  sorry;  but  I  cant 
spell  Szczepanowska. 

Percival.   I  think  it's  S,  z,  c,  z —  [Lina  gives  him  her 


80  Misalliance 

visiting-card].  Thank  you.  [He  throws  it  on  Bentley's 
blotter]. 

Bentley.    Thanks  awfully.     [Tie  writes  the  name]. 

Takleton  [to  Percival]    Now  it's  your  turn. 

Percival  [dictating]  I  further  confess  that  I  was  guilty 
of  uttering  an  abominable  calumny  concerning  Miss 
Hypatia  Tarleton,  for  which]  there  was  not  a  shred  of 
foundation. 

Impressive  silence  whilst  Bentley  writes. 

Bentley.    "foundation"? 

Pekcival.  I  apologize  most  humbly  to  the  lady  and  her 
family  for  my  conduct — [he  waits  for  Bentley  to  write]. 

Bentley.    "conduct"? 

Percival.  — and  I  promise  Mr  Tarleton  not  to  repeat 
it,  and  to  amend  my  life — 

Bentley.    "amend  my  life"? 

Percival.  — and  to  do  what  in  me  lies  to  prove  worthy 
of  his  kindness  in  giving  me  another  chance — 

Bentley.    "another  chance"? 

Percival.  — and  refraining  from  delivering  me  up  to 
the  punishment  I  so  richly  deserve. 

Bentley.    "richly  deserve." 

Percival.  [to  Hypatia]  Does  that  satisfy  you,  Miss 
Tarleton? 

Hypatia.    Yes :  that  will  teach  him  to  tell  lies  next  time. 

Bentley  [rising  to  make  place  for  Gunner  and  handing 
him  the  pen]  You  mean  it  will  teach  him  to  tell  the  truth 
next  time. 

Tarleton.    Ahem!     Do  you,  Patsy? 

Percival.  Be  good  enough  to  sign.  [Gunner  sits  down 
helplessly  and  dips  the  pen  in  the  ink].  I  hope  what  you  are 
signing  is  no  mere  form  of  words  to  you,  and  that  you  not 
only  say  you  are  sorry,  but  that  you  are  sorry. 

Lord  Summerhays  and  Johnny  come  in  through  the  pavil- 
ion door. 

Mrs   Tarleton.    Stop.    Mr  Percival:   I  think,  on  Hy- 


Misalliance  81 

patia's  account,  Lord  Summerhays  ought  to  be  told 
about  this. 

Lord  Summerhays,  wondering  what  the  matter  is,  comes 
forward  between  Percival  and  Lina.  Johnny  stops  beside 
Hypatia. 

Percival.    Certainly. 

Tarleton  [uneasily]  Take  my  advice,  and  cut  it  short. 
Get  rid  of  him. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Hypatia  ought  to  have  her  character 
cleared. 

Tarleton.  You  let  well  alone,  Chickabiddy.  Most  of 
our  characters  will  bear  a  little  careful  dusting;  but  they 
wont  bear  scouring.  Patsy  is  jolly  well  out  of  it.  What 
does  it  matter,  anyhow? 

Percival.  Mr  Tarleton:  we  have  already  said  either 
too  much  or  not  enough.  Lord  Summerhays:  will  you  be 
kind  enough  to  witness  the  declaration  this  man  has  just 
signed? 

Gunner.    I  havnt  yet.    Am  I  to  sign  now? 

Percival.  Of  course.  \Gunner,  who  is  now  incapable  of 
doing  anything  on  his  own  initiative,  signs].  Now  stand  up 
and  read  your  declaration  to  this  gentleman.  [Gunner 
makes  a  vague  movement  and  looks  stupidly  round.  Percival 
adds  peremptorily]    Now,  please. 

Gunner  [rising  apprehensively  and  reading  in  a  hardly 
audible  voice,  like  a  very  sick  man]  I,  John  Brown,  of  4 
Chesterfield  Parade,  Kentish  Town,  do  hereby  voluntarily 
confess  that  on  the  31st  May  1909  I  trespassed  on  the 
land  of  John  Tarleton  at  Hindhead,  and  effected  an  unlaw- 
ful entry  into  his  house,  where  I  secreted  myself  in  a 
portable  Turkish  bath,  with  a  pistol,  with  which  I  threat- 
ened to  take  the  life  of  the  said  John  Tarleton,  and  was 
prevented  from  doing  so  only  by  the  timely  arrival  of 
the  celebrated  Miss  Lena  Sh-Sh-sheepanossika.  I  further 
confess  that  I  was  guilty  of  uttering  an  abominable  cal- 
umny concerning  Miss  Hypatia  Tarleton,  for  which  there 


82  Misalliance 

was  not  a  shred  of  foundation.  I  apologize  most  humbly 
to  the  lady  and  her  family  for  my  conduct;  and  I  promise 
Mr  Tarleton  not  to  repeat  it,  and  to  amend  my  life,  and  to 
do  what  in  me  lies  to  prove  worthy  of  his  kindness  in 
giving  me  another  chance  and  refraining  from  delivering 
me  up  to  the  punishment  I  so  richly  deserve. 

A  short  and  painful  silence  follows.     Then  Per  rival  speaks. 

Percival.  Do  you  consider  that  sufficient,  Lord  Suin- 
merhays? 

Lord  Summerhays.    Oh  quite,  quite. 

Percival  [to  Hypatia]  Lord  Summerhays  would  prob- 
ably like  to  hear  you  say  that  you  are  satisfied,  Miss 
Tarleton. 

Hypatia  [coming  out  of  the  swing,  and  advancing  between 
Percival  and  Lord  Summerhays]  I  must  say  that  you  have 
behaved  like  a  perfect  gentleman,  Mr.  Percival. 

Percival  [first  bowing  to  Hypatia,  and  then  turning  with 
cold  contempt  to  Gunner,  who  is  standing  helpless]  We  need 
not  trouble  you  any  further.  [Gunner  turns  vaguely 
towards  the  pavilion]. 

Johnny  [with  less  refined  ojfensiveness,  pointing  to  the 
pavilion]  Thats  your  way.  The  gardener  will  shew  you 
the  shortest  way  into  the  road.     Go  the  shortest  way. 

Gunner  [oppressed  and  disconcerted,  hardly  knows  how 
to  get  out  of  the  room]  Yes,  sir.  I —  [He  turns  again,  appeal- 
ing to  Tarleton]  Maynt  I  have  my  mother's  photographs 
back  again?     [Mrs  Tarleton  pricks  up  her  ears]. 

Tarleton.  Eh?  What?  Oh,  the  photographs!  Yes, 
yes,  yes:  take  them.  [Gunner  takes  them  from  the  table, 
and  is  creeping  away,  when  Mrs  Tarleton  puts  out  Iter  hand 
and  stops  him]. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Whats  this,  John?  What  were  you 
doing  with  his  mother's  photographs? 

Tarleton.  Nothing,  nothing.  Never  mind,  Chicka- 
biddy:   it's  all  right. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [snatching  the  photographs  from  Gun- 


Misalliance  83 

tier's  irresolute  fingers,  and  recognizing  them  at  a  glance] 
Lucy  Titmus!    Oh  John,  John! 

Tarleton  [grimly,  to  Gunner]  Young  man:  youre  a 
fool;  but  youve  just  put  the  lid  on  this  job  in  a  masterly 
manner.  I  knew  you  would.  I  told  you  all  to  let  well  alone. 
You  wouldnt;  and  now  you  must  take  the  consequences 
— or  rather  I  must  take  them. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [to  Gunner]    Are  you  Lucy's  son? 

Gunner.    Yes. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  And  why  didnt  you  come  to  me?  I 
didnt  turn  my  back  on  your  mother  when  she  came  to  me 
in  her  trouble.     Didnt  you  know  that? 

Gunner.    No.    She  never  talked  to  me  about  anything. 

Tarleton.  How  could  she  talk  to  her  own  son?  Shy, 
Summerhays,  shy.  Parent  and  child.  Shy.  [He  sits  down 
at  the  end  of  the  writing  table  nearest  the  sideboard  like  a  man 
resigned  to  anything  that  fate  may  have  in  store  for  him]. 

Mrs  Tarleton.   Then  how  did  you  find  out? 

Gunner.    From  her  papers  after  she  died. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [shocked]  Is  Lucy  dead?  And  I  never 
knew!  [With  an  effusion  of  tenderness]  And  you  here 
being  treated  like  that,  poor  orphan,  with  nobody  to  take 
your  part!  Tear  up  that  foolish  paper,  child;  and  sit 
down  and  make  friends  with  me. 

Johnny  [Hallo,  mother:  this  is  all  very  well,  you 
know — 

Percival     '  But  may  I  point  out,  Mrs  Tarleton,  that — 

Bentley         Do  you  mean  that  after  what  he  said  of — 

Hypatia    J    I  Oh,  look  here,  mamma:   this  is  really — 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Will  you  please  speak  one  at  a  time? 

Silence. 

Percival  [in  a  very  gentlemanly  manner]  Will  you  allow 
me  to  remind  you,  Mrs  Tarleton,  that  this  man  has  uttered 
a  most  serious  and  disgraceful  falsehood  concerning  Miss 
Tarleton  and  myself? 

Mrs  Tarleton.    I  dont  believe  a  word  of  it.     If  the 


84  Misalliance 

poor  lad  was  there  in  the  Turkish  bath,  who  has  a  better 
right  to  say  what  was  going  on  here  than  he  has?  You 
ought  to  be  ashamed  of  yourself,  Patsy;  and  so  ought 
you  too,  Mr  Percival,  for  encouraging  her.  [Hypatia  re- 
treats to  the  pavilion,  and  exchanges  grimaces  with  Johnny, 
shamelessly  enjoying  PercivaVs  sudden  reverse.  They  know 
their  mother]. 

Percival  [gasping]  Mrs  Tarleton :  I  give  you  my  word 
of  honor — 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  go  along  with  you  and  your  word 
of  honor.  Do  you  think  I'm  a  fool?  I  wonder  you  can  look 
the  lad  in  the  face  after  bullying  him  and  making  him  sign 
those  wicked  lies;  and  all  the  time  you  carrying  on  with 
my  daughter  before  youd  been  half  an  hour  in  my  house. 
Fie,  for  shame! 

Percival.  Lord  Summerhays:  I  appeal  to  you.  Have 
I  done  the  correct  thing  or  not? 

Lord  Summerhays.  Youve  done  your  best,  Mr  Perci- 
val^ But  the  correct  thing  depends  for  its  success  on  every- 
body playing  the  game  very  strictly.  As  a  single-handed 
game,  it's  impossible. 

Bentley  [suddenly  breaking  out  lamentably]  Joey:  have 
you  taken  Hypatia  away  from  me? 

Lord  Summerhays  [severely]  Bentley!  Bentley!  Con- 
trol yourself,  sir. 

Tarleton.  Come,  Mr  Percival!  the  shutters  are  up  on 
the  gentlemanly  business.     Try  the  truth. 

Percival.  I  am  in  a  wretched  position.  If  I  tell  the 
truth  nobody  will  believe  me. 

Tarleton.  Oh  yes  they  will.  The  truth  makes  every- 
body believe  it. 

Percival.  It  also  makes  everybody  pretend  not  to 
believe  it.  Mrs  Tarleton:  youre  not  playing  the 
game. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  I  dont  think  youve  behaved  at  all 
nicely,  Mr  Percival. 


Misalliance  85 

Bentley.  I  wouldnt  have  played  you  such  a  dirty 
trick,  Joey.     [Struggling  with  a  sob]    You  beast. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Bentley:  you  must  control  your- 
self. Let  me  say  at  the  same  time,  Mr  Percival,  that  my 
son  seems  to  have  been  mistaken  in  regarding  you  either  as 
his  friend  or  as  a  gentleman. 

Percival.  Miss  Tarleton:  I'm  suffering  this  for  your 
sake.  I  ask  you  just  to  say  that  I  am  not  to  blame.  Just 
that  and  nothing  more. 

Hypatia  [gloating  mischievously  over  his  distress]  You 
chased  me  through  the  heather  and  kissed  me.  You 
shouldnt  have  done  that  if  you  were  not  in  earnest. 

Percival.  Oh,  this  is  really  the  limit.  [Turning  des- 
perately to  Gunner]  Sir:  I  appeal  to  you.  As  a  gentleman! 
as  a  man  of  honor!  as  a  man  bound  to  stand  by  another 
man!  You  were  in  that  Turkish  bath.  You  saw  how  it 
began.  Could  any  man  have  behaved  more  correctly  than 
I  did?  Is  there  a  shadow  of  foundation  for  the  accusations 
brought  against  me? 

Gunner  [sorely  perplexed]  Well,  what  do  you  want  me 
to  say? 

Johnny.  He  has  said  what  he  had  to  say  already,  hasnt 
he?    Read  that  paper. 

Gunner.  When  I  tell  the  truth,  you  make  me  go  back 
on  it.  And  now  you  want  me  to  go  back  on  myself!  What 
is  a  man  to  do? 

Percival  [patiently]  Please  try  to  get  your  mind  clear, 
Mr  Brown.  I  pointed  out  to  you  that  you  could  not,  as  a 
gentleman,  disparage  a  lady's  character.  You  agree  with 
me,  I  hope. 

Gunner.    Yes :   that  sounds  all  right. 

Percival.  But  youre  also  bound  to  tell  the  truth. 
Surely  youll  not  deny  that. 

Gunner.     Who's  denying  it?     I  say  nothing  against 

it. 

Percival.    Of  course  not.     Well,  I  ask  you  to  tell  the 


86  Misalliance 

truth  simply  and  unaffectedly.  Did  you  witness  any  im- 
proper conduct  on  my  part  when  you  were  in  the  bath? 

Gunner.    No,  sir. 

Johnny      ^    f  Then  what  do  you  mean  by  saying  that — 

Hypatia     j-  \  Do  you  mean  to  say  that  I — 

Bentley    J    I  Oh,  you  are  a  rotter.     Youre  afraid — 

Tarleton  [rising]  Stop.  [Silence].  Leave  it  at  that. 
Enough  said.  You  keep  quiet,  Johnny.  Mr  Percival: 
youre  whitewashed.  So  are  you,  Patsy.  Honors  are  easy. 
Lets  drop  the  subject.  The  next  thing  to  do  is  to  open  a 
subscription  to  start  this  young  man  on  a  ranch  in  some 
far  country  thats  accustomed  to  be  in  a  disturbed  state. 
He— 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Now  stop  joking  the  poor  lad,  John: 
I  wont  have  it.  Hes  been  worried  to  death  between  you  all. 
[To  Gunner]     Have  you  had  your  tea? 

Gunner.  Tea?  No:  it's  too  early.  I'm  all  right;  only 
I  had  no  dinner:  I  didnt  think  I'd  want  it.  I  didnt  think 
I'd  be  alive. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  what  a  thing  to  say !  You  mustnt 
talk  like  that. 

Johnny.  Hes  out  of  his  mind.  He  thinks  it's  past 
dinner-time. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  youve  no  sense,  Johnny.  He  calls 
his  lunch  his  dinner,  and  has  his  tea  at  half-past  six. 
Havnt  you,  dear? 

Gunner  [timidly]    Hasnt  everybody? 

Johnny  [laughing]    Well,  by  George,  thats  not  bad. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Now  dont  be  rude,  Johnny:  you  know 
I  dont  like  it.  [To  Gunner]  A  cup  of  tea  will  pick  you 
up. 

Gunner.    I'd  rather  not.    I'm  all  right. 

Tarleton  [going  to  the  sideboard]  Here !  try  a  mouthful 
of  sloe  gin. 

Gunner.  No,  thanks.  I'm  a  teetotaler.  I  cant  touch 
alcohol  in  anv  form. 


Misalliance  87 

Tarleton.  Nonsense!  This  isnt  alcohol.  Sloe  gin. 
Vegetarian,  you  know. 

Gunner  [hesitating]    Is  it  a  fruit  beverage? 

Tarleton.  Of  course  it  is.  Fruit  beverage.  Here  you 
are.    [He  gives  him  a  glass  of  sloe  gin]. 

Gunner  [going  to  the  sideboard]  Thanks.  [He  begins  to 
drink  it  confidently;  but  the  first  mouthful  startles  and  almost 
chokes  Mm].    It's  rather  hot. 

Tarleton.    Do  you  good.     Dont  be  afraid  of  it. 

Mrs  Tarleton  [going  to  him]  Sip  it,  dear.  Dont  be  in 
a  hurry. 

Gunner  sips  slowly,  each  sip  making  his  eyes  water. 

Johnny  [coming  forward  into  the  place  left  vacant  by  Gun- 
ner's visit  to  the  sideboard]  Well,  now  that  the  gentleman 
has  been  attended  to,  I  should  like  to  know  where  we  are. 
It  may  be  a  vulgar  business  habit;  but  I  confess  I  like  to 
know  where  I  am. 

Tarleton.  I  dont.  Wherever  you  are,  youre  there  any- 
how.   I  tell  you  again,  leave  it  at  that. 

Bentley.  I  want  to  know  too.  Hypatia's  engaged  to 
me. 

Hypatia.  Bentley:  if  you  insult  me  again — if  you  say 
another  word,  I'll  leave  the  house  and  not  enter  it  until 
you  leave  it. 

Johnny.  Put  that  in  your  pipe  and  smoke  it,  my 
boy. 

Bentley  [inarticulate  with  fury  and  suppressed  tears] 
Oh!     Beasts!     Brutes! 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Now  dont  hurt  his  feelings,  poor  little 
lamb! 

Lord  Summerhays  [very  sternly]  Bentley:  you  are  not 
behaving  well.  You  had  better  leave  us  until  you  have 
recovered  yourself. 

Bentley  goes  out  in  disgrace,  but  gets  no  further  than  half 
way  to  the  pavilion  door,  when,  with  a  wild  sob,  he  throws 
himself  on  the  floor  and  begins  to  yell. 


88 


Misalliance 


Mrs  Tarleton 


Lord  Summer- 
hays 
Johnny 


Hypatia 


Tarleton 


[running  to  him]  Oh,  poor  child, 
poor  child!  Dont  cry,  duckie: 
he  didnt  mean  it:    dont  cry. 

Stop  that  infernal  noise,  sir:  do  you 
hear?     Stop  it  instantly. 

Thats  the  game  he  tried  on  me. 
There  you  are!  Now,  mother! 
Now,  Patsy!  You  see  for  your- 
selves. 

[covering  her  ears]  Oh  you  little 
wretch!  Stop  him,  Mr  Percival. 
Kick  him. 

Steady  on,  steady  on. 
easy. 

to  me,  Mrs  Tarleton. 


Easy,  Bunny, 


Stand  clear, 


Lina.    Leave  him 
please. 

She  kneels  opposite  Bentley;  quickly  lifts  the  upper  half  of 
him  from  the  ground;  dives  under  him;  rises  with  his  body 
hanging  across  her  shoulders;  and  runs  out  with  him. 

Bentley  [in  scared,  sobered,  humble  tones  as  he  is  borne 
off]  What  are  you  doing?  Let  me  down.  Please,  Miss 
Szczepanowska — [they  pass  out  of  hearing]. 

An  awestruck  silence  falls  on  the  company  as  they  speculate 
on  Bentley' 's  fate. 

Johnny.    I  wonder  what  shes  going  to  do  with  him. 

Hypatia.    Spank  him,  I  hope.     Spank  him  hard. 

Lord  Summerhays.  I  hope  so.  I  hope  so.  Tarleton: 
I'm  beyond  measure  humiliated  and  annoyed  by  my  son's 
behavior  in  your  house.     I  had  better  take  him  home. 

Tarleton.  Not  at  all:  not  at  all.  Now,  Chickabiddy: 
as  Miss  Lina  has  taken  away  Ben,  suppose  you  take  away 
Mr  Brown  for  a  while 

Gunner  [with  unexpected  aggressiveness]  My  name  isnt 
Brown.  [They  stare  at  him:  he  meets  their  stare  defiantly, 
pugnacious  with  sloe  gin;  drains  the  last  drop  from  his  glass; 
throws  it  on  the  sideboard;  and  advances  to  the  xoriting  table]. 


Misalliance  89 

My  name's  Baker:   Julius  Baker.    M i s t e r  Baker.    If  any 
man  doubts  it,  I'm  ready  for  him. 

Mrs  Tarleton.    John:    you  shouldnt  have  given  him 
that  sloe  gin.     It's  gone  to  his  head. 

Gunner.  Dont  you  think  it.  Fruit  beverages  dont  go 
to  the  head;  and  what  matter  if  they  did?  I  say  nothing 
to  you,  maam:  I  regard  you  with  respect  and  affection. 
[Lachrymosely]  You  were  very  good  to  my  mother:  my 
poor  mother!  [Relapsing  into -his  daring  mood]  But  I  say 
my  name's  Baker;  and  I'm  not  to  be  treated  as  a  child  or 
made  a  slave  of  by  any  man.  Baker  is  my  name.  Did  you 
think  I  was  going  to  give  you  my  real  name?  Not  likely. 
Not  me. 

Tarleton.  So  you  thought  of  John  Brown.  That  was 
clever  of  you. 

Gunner.  Clever!  Yes:  we're  not  all  such  fools  as  you 
think:  we  clerks.  It  was  the  bookkeeper  put  me  up  to 
that.  It's  the  only  name  that  nobody  gives  as  a  false  name, 
he  said.     Clever,  eh?     I  should  think  so. 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Come  now,  Julius — 

Gunner  [reassuring  her  gravely]  Dont  you  be  alarmed, 
maam.  I  know  what  is  due  to  you  as  a  lady  and  to  myself 
as  a  gentleman.  I  regard  you  with  respect  and  affection. 
If  you  had  been  my  mother,  as  you  ought  to  have  been,  I 
should  have  had  more  chance.  But  you  shall  have  no 
cause  to  be  ashamed  of  me.  The  strength  of  a  chain  is  no 
greater  than  its  weakest  link;  but  the  greatness  of  a  poet 
is  the  greatness  of  his  greatest  moment.  Shakespear  used 
to  get  drunk.  Frederick  the  Great  ran  away  from  a  battle. 
But  it  was  what  they  could  rise  to,  not  what  they  could 
sink  to,  that  made  them  great.  They  werent  good  always; 
but  they  were  good  on  their  day.  Well,  on  my  day — on  my 
day,  mind  you — I'm  good  for  something  too.  I  know  that 
Ive  made  a  silly  exhibition  of  myself  here.  I  know  I  didnt 
rise  to  the  occasion.  I  know  that  if  youd  been  my  mother, 
youd  have  been  ashamed  of  me.     I  lost  my  presence  of 


90  Misalliance 

mind :  I  was  a  contemptible  coward.  But  [slapping  himself 
on  the  chest]  I'm  not  the  man  I  was  then.  This  is  my  day. 
Ive  seen  the  tenth  possessor  of  a  foolish  face  carried  out 
kicking  and  screaming  by  a  woman.  [To  Percival]  You 
crowed  pretty  big  over  me.  You  hypnotized  me.  But 
when  you  were  put  through  the  fire  yourself,  you  were 
found  wanting.  I  tell  you  straight  I  dont  give  a  damn 
for  you. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  No:  thats  naughty.  You  shouldnt 
say  that  before  me. 

Gunner.  I  would  cut  my  tongue  out  sooner  than  say 
anything  vulgar  in  your  presence;  for  I  regard  you  with 
respect  and  affection.  I  was  not  swearing.  I  was  affirm- 
ing my  manhood. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  What  an  idea!  What  puts  all  these 
things  into  your  head? 

Gunner.  Oh,  dont  you  think,  because  I'm  a  clerk, 
that  I'm  not  one  of  the  intellectuals.  I'm  a  reading  man,  a 
thinking  man.  I  read  in  a  book — a  high  class  six  shilling 
book — this  precept:  Affirm  your  manhood.  It  appealed  to 
me.  Ive  always  remembered  it.  I  believe  in  it.  I  feel  I 
must  do  it  to  recover  your  respect  after  my  cowardly 
behavior.  Therefore  I  affirm  it  in  your  presence.  I  tell 
that  man  who  insulted  me  that  I  dont  give  a  damn  for 
him.    And  neither  I  do. 

Tarleton.  I  say,  Summerhays:  did  you  have  chaps  of 
this  sort  in  Jinghiskahn? 

Lord  Summerhays.    Oh  yes:    they  exist  everywhere: 
they  are  a  most  serious  modern  problem. 

Gunner.  Yes.  Youre  right.  [Conceitedly]  I'm  a  prob- 
lem. And  I  tell  you  that  when  we  clerks  realize  that  we're 
problems!    well,  look  out:    thats  all. 

Lord  Summerhays  [suavely,  to  Gunner]  You  read  a  great 
deal,  you  say? 

Gunner.  Ive  read  more  than  any  man  in  this  room,  if 
the  truth  were  known,  I  expect.     Thats  whats  going  to 


Misalliance  91 

smash  up  your  Capitalism.  The  problems  are  beginning  to 
read.  Ha!  We're  free  to  do  that  here  in  England.  What 
would  you  do  with  me  in  Jinghiskahn  if  you  had  me 
there? 

Lord  Summerhays.  Well,  since  you  ask  me  so  directly, 
I'll  tell  you.  I  should  take  advantage  of  the  fact  that  you 
have  neither  sense  enough  nor  strength  enough  to  know 
how  to  behave  yourself  in  a  difficulty  of  any  sort.  I  should 
warn  an  intelligent  and  ambitious  policeman  that  you  are 
a  troublesome  person.  The  intelligent  and  ambitious  po- 
liceman would  take  an  early  opportunity  of  upsetting  your 
temper  by  ordering  you  to  move  on,  and  treading  on  your 
heels  until  you  were  provoked  into  obstructing  an  officer 
in  the  discharge  of  his  duty.  Any  trifle  of  that  sort  would 
be  sufficient  to  make  a  man  like  you  lose  your  self-pos- 
session and  put  yourself  in  the  wrong.  You  would  then 
be  charged  and  imprisoned  until  things  quieted  down. 

Gunner.    And  you  call  that  justice! 

Lord  Summerhays.  No.  Justice  was  not  my  business. 
I  had  to  govern  a  province;  and  I  took  the  necessary  steps 
to  maintain  order  in  it.  Men  are  not  governed  by  justice, 
but  by  law  or  persuasion.  When  they  refuse  to  be  gov- 
erned by  law  or  persuasion,  they  have  to  be  governed  by 
force  or  fraud,  or  both.  I  used  both  when  law  and  persua- 
sion failed  me.  Every  ruler  of  men  since  the  world  began 
has  done  so,  even  when  he  has  hated  both  fraud  and  force 
as  heartily  as  I  do.  It  is  as  well  that  you  should  know  this, 
my  young  friend;  so  that  you  may  recognize  in  time  that 
anarchism  is  a  game  at  which  the  police  can  beat  you. 
What  have  you  to  say  to  that? 

Gunner.  What  have  I  to  say  to  it!  Well,  I  call  it 
scandalous:   thats  what  I  have  to  say  to  it. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Precisely:  thats  all  anybody  has  to 
say  to  it,  except  the  British  public,  which  pretends  not  to 
believe  it.  And  now  let  me  ask  you  a  sympathetic  per- 
sonal question.     Havnt  you  a  headache? 


92  Misalliance 

Gunner.  Well,  since  you  ask  me,  I  have.  Ive  over- 
excited myself. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Poor  lad!  No  wonder,  after  all  youve 
gone  through!  You  want  to  eat  a  little  and  to  lie  down. 
You  come  with  me.  I  want  you  to  tell  me  about  your  poor 
dear  mother  and  about  yourself.  Come  along  with  me. 
[She  leads  the  way  to  the  inner  door]. 

Gunner  [following  her  obediently]  Thank  you  kindly, 
madam.  [She  goes  out.  Before  passing  out  after  her,  he 
partly  closes  the  door  and  stops  on  the  landing  for  a  moment 
to  say]  Mind:  I'm  not  knuckling  down  to  any  man  here. 
I  knuckle  down  to  Mrs  Tarleton  because  shes  a  woman  in 
a  thousand.  I  affirm  my  manhood  all  the  same.  Under- 
stand: I  dont  give  a  damn  for  the  lot  of  you.  [He  hurries 
out,  rather  afraid  of  the  consequences  of  this  defiance,  which 
has  provoked  Johnny  to  an  impatient  movement  towards 
him]. 

Hypatia.  Thank  goodness  hes  gone!  Oh,  what  a  bore! 
WHAT  a  bore! ! !     Talk,  talk,  talk! 

Tarleton.  Patsy:  it's  no  good.  We're  going  to  talk. 
And  we're  going  to  talk  about  you. 

Johnny.  It's  no  use  shirking  it,  Pat.  We'd  better  know 
where  we  are. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Come,  Miss  Tarleton.  Wont  you 
sit  down?  I'm  very  tired  of  standing.  [Hypatia  comes 
from  the  pavilion  and  takes  a  chair  at  the  worktable.  Lord 
Summerhays  takes  the  opposite  chair,  on  her  right.  Percival 
takes  the  chair  Johnny  placed  for  Lina  on  her  arrival.  Tarle- 
ton sits  down  at  the  end  of  the  writing  table.  Johnny  remains 
standing.  Lord  Summerhays  continues,  with  a  sigh  of  relief 
at  being  seated.]  We  shall  now  get  the  change  of  subject 
we  are  all  pining  for. 

Johnny  [puzzled]    Whats  that? 

Lord  Summerhays.  The  great  question.  The  question 
that  men  and  women  will  spend  hours  over  without 
complaining.     The  question  that  occupies  all  the  novel 


Misalliance  93 

readers  and  all  the  playgoers.  The  question  they  never 
get  tired  of. 

Johnny.    But  what  question? 

Lord  Summerhays.  The  question  which  particular 
young  man  some  young  woman  will  mate  with. 

Percival.    As  if  it  mattered! 

Hypatia  [sharply]    Whats  that  you  said? 

Percival.    I  said:   As  if  it  mattered. 

Hypatia.    I  call  that  ungentlemanly. 

Percival.  Do  you  care  about  that?  you  who  are  so 
magnificently  unladylike! 

Johnny.  Look  here,  Mr  Percival:  youre  not  supposed 
to  insult  my  sister. 

Hypatia.  Oh,  shut  up,  Johnny.  I  can  take  care  of  my- 
self.    Dont  you  interfere. 

Johnny.  Oh,  very  well.  If  you  choose  to  give  yourself 
away  like  that — to  allow  a  man  to  call  you  unladylike  and 
then  to  be  unladylike,  Ive  nothing  more  to  say. 

Hypatia.  I  think  Mr  Percival  is  most  ungentlemanly; 
but  I  wont  be  protected.  I'll  not  have  my  affairs  inter- 
fered with  by  men  on  pretence  of  protecting  me.  I'm  not 
your  baby.  If  I  interfered  between  you  and  a  woman,  you 
would  soon  tell  me  to  mind  my  own  business. 

Tarleton.  Children:  dont  squabble.  Read  Dr  Watts. 
Behave  yourselves. 

Johnny.  Ive  nothing  more  to  say;  and  as  I  dont  seem 
to  be  wanted  here,  I  shall  take  myself  off.  [He  goes  out  with 
affected  calm  through  the  pavilion]. 

Tarleton.  Summerhays:  a  family  is  an  awful  thing, 
an  impossible  thing.  Cat  and  dog.  Patsy:  I'm  ashamed  of 
you. 

Hypatia.  I'll  make  it  up  with  Johnny  afterwards;  but 
I  really  cant  have  him  here  sticking  his  clumsy  hoof  into 
my  affairs. 

Lord  Summerhays.  The  question  is,  Mr  Percival,  are 
you  really  a  gentleman,  or  are  you  not? 


94  Misalliance 

Percival.  Was  Napoleon  really  a  gentleman  or  was  he 
not?  He  made  the  lady  get  out  of  the  way  of  the  porter 
and  said,  "Respect  the  burden,  madam."  That  was  be- 
having like  a  very  fine  gentleman;  but  he  kicked  Volney 
for  saying  that  what  France  wanted  was  the  Bourbons 
back  again.  That  was  behaving  rather  like  a  navvy.  Now 
I,  like  Napoleon,  am  not  all  one  piece.  On  occasion,  as 
you  have  all  seen,  I  can  behave  like  a  gentleman.  On 
occasion,  I  can  behave  with  a  brutal  simplicity  which  Miss 
Tarleton  herself  could  hardly  surpass. 

Tarleton.  Gentleman  or  no  gentleman,  Patsy:  what 
are  your  intentions? 

Hyp ati a.  My  intentions!  Surely  it's  the  gentleman 
who  should  be  asked  his  intentions. 

Tarleton.  Come  now,  Patsy!  none  of  that  nonsense. 
Has  Mr  Percival  said  anything  to  you  that  I  ought  to  know 
or  that  Bentley  ought  to  know?  Have  you  said  anything 
to  Mr  Percival? 

Hypatia.  Mr  Percival  chased  me  through  the  heather 
and  kissed  me. 

Lord  Summerhays.  As  a  gentleman,  Mr  Percival,  what 
do  you  say  to  that? 

Percival.  As  a  gentleman,  I  do  not  kiss  and  tell.  As  a 
mere  man:  a  mere  cad,  if  you  like,  I  say  that  I  did  so  at 
Miss  Tarleton 's  own  suggestion. 

Hypatia.    Beast! 

Percival.  I  dont  deny  that  I  enjoyed  it.  But  I  did  not 
initiate  it.    And  I  began  by  running  away. 

Tarleton.    So  Patsy  can  run  faster  than  you,  can  she? 

Percival.  Yes,  when  she  is  in  pursuit  of  me.  She  runs 
faster  and  faster.  I  run  slower  and  slower.  And  these 
woods  of  yours  are  full  of  magic.  There  was  a  confounded 
fern  owl.  Did  you  ever  hear  the  churr  of  a  fern  owl?  Did 
you  ever  hear  it  create  a  sudden  silence  by  ceasing?  Did 
you  ever  hear  it  call  its  mate  by  striking  its  wings  together 
twice  and  whistling  that  single  note  than  no  nightingale 


Misalliance  95 

can  imitate?  That  is  what  happened  in  the  woods  when 
I  was  running  away.  So  I  turned;  and  the  pursuer  be- 
came the  pursued. 

Hypatia.    I  had  to  fight  like  a  wild  cat. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Please  dont  tell  us  this.  It's  not 
fit  for  old  people  to  hear. 

Tarleton.    Come:  how  did  it  end? 

Hypatia.    It's  not  ended  yet. 

Tarleton.    How  is  it  going  to  end? 

Hypatia.    Ask  him. 

Tarleton.    How  is  it  going  to  end,  Mr  Percival? 

Percival.  I  cantvafford  to  marry,  Mr  Tarleton.  Ive 
only  a  thousand  a  year  until  my  father  dies.  Two  people 
cant  possibly  live  on  that. 

Tarleton.  Oh,  cant  they?  When  I  married,  I  should 
have  been  jolly  glad  to  have  felt  sure  of  the  quarter  of  it. 

Percival.  No  doubt;  but  I  am  not  a  cheap  person,  Mr 
Tarleton.  I  was  brought  up  in  a  household  which  cost  at 
least  seven  or  eight  times  that;  and  I  am  in  constant 
money  difficulties  because  I  simply  dont  know  how  to  live 
on  the  thousand  a  year  scale.  As  to  ask  a  woman  to  share 
my  degrading  poverty,  it's  out  of  the  question.  Besides, 
I'm  rather  young  to  marry.    I'm  only  28. 

Hypatia.    Papa:    buy  the  brute  for  me. 

Lord  Summerhays  [shrinking]  My  dear  Miss  Tarleton : 
dont  be  so  naughty.  I  know  how  delightful  it  is  to  shock 
an  old  man;  but  there  is  a  point  at  which  it  becomes 
barbarous.     Dont.     Please  dont. 

Hypatia.    Shall  I  tell  Papa  about  you? 

Lord  Summerhays.  Tarleton:  I  had  better  tell  you 
that  I  once  asked  your  daughter  to  become  my  widow. 

Tarleton  [to  Hypatia]  Why  didnt  you  accept  him,  you 
young  idiot? 

Lord  Summerhays.    I  was  too  old. 

Tarleton.  All  this  has  been  going  on  under  my  nose,  I 
suppose.     You  run  after  young  men;    and  old  men  run 


96  Misalliance 

after  you.  And  I'm  the  last  person  in  the  world  to  hear 
of  it. 

Hypatia.    How  could  I  tell  you? 

Lord  Summeehays.    Parents  and  children,  Tarleton. 

Tarleton.  Oh,  the  gulf  that  lies  between  them!  the 
impassable,  eternal  gulf!  And  so  I'm  to  buy  the  brute  for 
you, eh? 

Hypatia.    If  you  please,  papa. 

Tarleton.    Whats  the  price,  Mr  Percival? 

Percival.  We  might  do  with  another  fifteen  hun- 
dred if  my  father  would  contribute.  But  I  should  like 
more. 

Tarleton.  It's  purely  a  question  of  money  with  you, 
is  it? 

Percival  [after  a  moment's  consideration]  Practically 
yes:    it  turns  on  that. 

Tarleton.  I  thought  you  might  have  some  sort  of 
preference  for  Patsy,  you  know. 

Percival.  Well,  but  does  that  matter,  do  you  think? 
Patsy  fascinates  me,  no  doubt.  I  apparently  fascinate 
Patsy.  But,  believe  me,  all  that  is  not  worth  considering. 
One  of  my  three  fathers  (the  priest)  has  married  hundreds 
of  couples:  couples  selected  by  one  another,  couples  se- 
lected by  the  parents,  couples  forced  to  marry  one  another 
by  circumstances  of  one  kind  or  another;  and  he  assures 
me  that  if  marriages  were  made  by  putting  all  the  men's 
names  into  one  sack  and  the  women's  names  into  another, 
and  having  them  taken  out  by  a  blindfolded  child  like  lot- 
tery numbers,  there  would  be  just  as  high  a  percentage  of 
happy  marriages  as  we  have  here  in  England.  He  said 
Cupid  was  nothing  but  the  blindfolded  child:  pretty  idea 
that,  I  think!  I  shall  have  as  good  a  chance  with  Patsy  as 
with  anyone  else.  Mind:  I'm  not  bigoted  about  it.  I'm 
not  a  doctrinaire:  not  the  slave  of  a  theory.  You  and  Lord 
Summerhays  are  experienced  married  men.  If  you  can 
tell  me  of  any  trustworthy  method  of  selecting  a  wife,  I 


Misalliance  97 

shall  be  happy  to  make  use  of  it.  I  await  your  sugges- 
tions. [He  looks  with  polite  attention  to  Lord  Summerhays, 
who,  having  nothing  to  say,  avoids  his  eye.  He  looks  to 
Tarleton,  who  purses  his  lips  glumly  and  rattles  his  money 
in  his  pockets  without  a  word].  Apparently  neither  of  you 
has  anything  to  suggest.  Then  Patsy  will  do  as  well  as 
another,  provided  the  money  is  forthcoming. 

Hypatia.    Oh,  you  beauty,  you  beauty! 

Tarleton.  When  I  married  Patsy's  mother,  I  was  in 
love  with  her. 

Percival.    For  the  first  time? 

Tarleton.    Yes:   for  the  first  time. 

Percival.    For  the  last  time? 

Lord  Summerhays  [revolted]  Sir:  you  are  in  the  pres- 
ence of  his  daughter. 

Hypatia.  Oh,  dont  mind  me.  I  dont  care.  I'm  accus- 
tomed to  Papa's  adventures. 

Tarleton  [blushing  painfully]  Patsy,  my  child:  that  was 
not — not   delicate. 

Hypatia.  Well,  papa,  youve  never  shewn  any  delicacy 
in  talking  to  me  about  my  conduct;  and  I  really  dont  see 
why  I  shouldnt  talk  to  you  about  yours.  It's  such  non- 
sense!   Do  you  think  young  people  dont  know? 

Lord  Summerhays.  I'm  sure  they  dont  feel.  Tarleton: 
this  is  too  horrible,  too  brutal.  If  neither  of  these  young 
people  have  any — any — any — 

Percival.  Shall  we  say  paternal  sentimentality?  I'm 
extremely  sorry  to  shock  you;  but  you  must  remember 
that  Ive  been  educated  to  discuss  human  affairs  with  three 
fathers  simultaneously.  I'm  an  adult  person.  Patsy  is  an 
adult  person.  You  do  not  inspire  me  with  veneration. 
Apparently  you  do  not  inspire  Patsy  with  veneration. 
That  may  surprise  you.  It  may  pain  you.  I'm  sorry.  It 
cant  be  helped.     What  about  the  money? 

Tarleton.  You  dont  inspire  me  with  generosity, 
young  man. 


98  Misalliance 

Hypatia  [laughing  with  genuine  amusement]  He  had  you 
there,  Joey. 

Tarleton.    I  havnt  been  a  bad  father  to  you,  Patsy. 

Hypatia.  I  dont  say  you  have,  dear.  If  only  I  could 
persuade  you  Ive  grown  up,  we  should  get  along  perfectly. 

Tarleton.    Do  you  remember  Bill  Burt? 

Hypatia.    Why? 

Tarleton  [to  the  others]  Bill  Burt  was  a  laborer  here. 
I  was  going  to  sack  him  for  kicking  his  father.  He  said 
his  father  had  kicked  him  until  he  was  big  enough  to  kick 
back.  Patsy  begged  him  off.  I  asked  that  man  what  it 
felt  like  the  first  time  he  kicked  his  father,  and  found  that 
it  was  just  like  kicking  any  other  man.  He  laughed  and 
said  that  it  was  the  old  man  that  knew  what  it  felt  like. 
Think  of  that,  Summerhays!     think  of  that! 

Hypatia.    I  havnt  kicked  you,  papa. 

Tarleton.  Youve  kicked  me  harder  than  Bill  Burt  ever 
kicked. 

Lord  Summerhays.  It's  no  use,  Tarleton.  Spare  your- 
self. Do  you  seriously  expect  these  young  people,  at  their 
age,  to  sympathize  with  what  this  gentleman  calls  your 
paternal  sentimentality? 

Tarleton  [wistfully]  Is  it  nothing  to  you  but  paternal 
sentimentality,  Patsy? 

Hypatia.  Well,  I  greatly  prefer  your  superabundant 
vitality,  papa. 

Tarleton  [violently]  Hold  your  tongue,  you  young 
devil.  The  young  are  all  alike:  hard,  coarse,  shallow, 
cruel,  selfish,  dirty-minded.  You  can  clear  out  of  my  house 
as  soon  as  you  can  coax  him  to  take  you;  and  the  sooner 
the  better.  [To  Percival]  I  think  you  said  your  price  was 
fifteen  hundred  a  year.  Take  it.  And  I  wish  you  joy  of 
your  bargain. 

Percival.    If  you  wish  to  know  who  I  am — 

Tarleton.  I  dont  care  a  tinker's  curse  who  you  are 
or  what  you  are.     Youre  willing  to  take  that  girl  off  my 


Misalliance  99 

hands  for  fifteen  hundred  a  year:  thats  all  that  concerns 
me.  Tell  her  who  you  are  if  you  like:  it's  her  affair,  not 
mine. 

Hypatia.  Dont  answer  him,  Joey:  it  wont  last.  Lord 
Summerhays,  I'm  sorry  about  Bentley ;  but  Joey's  the  only 
man  for  me. 

Lord  Summerhays.    It  may — 

Hypatia.  Please  dont  say  it  may  break  your  poor  boy's 
heart.     It's  much  more  likely  to  break  yours. 

Lord  Summerhays.    Oh! 

Tarleton  [springing  to  his  feet]  Leave  the  room.  Do 
you  hear:   leave  the  room. 

Perctval.  Arnt  we  getting  a  little  cross?  Dont  be 
angry,  Mr  Tarleton.     Read  Marcus  Aurelius. 

Tarleton.  Dont  you  dare  make  fun  of  me.  Take  your 
aeroplane  out  of  my  vinery  and  yourself  out  of  my  house. 

Percival  [rising,  to  Hypatia]  I'm  afraid  I  shall  have  to 
dine  at  the  Beacon,  Patsy. 

Hypatia  [rising]    Do.    I  dine  with  you. 

Tarleton.    Did  you  hear  me  tell  you  to  leave  the  room? 

Hypatia.  I  did.  [To  Percival]  You  see  what  living  with 
one's  parents  means,  Joey.  It  means  living  in  a  house 
where  you  can  be  ordered  to  leave  the  room.  Ive  got  to 
obey:   it's  his  house,  not  mine. 

Tarleton.  Who  pays  for  it?  Go  and  support  yourself 
as  I  did  if  you  want  to  be  independent. 

Hypatia.  I  wanted  to  and  you  wouldnt  let  me.  How 
can  I  support  myself  when  I'm  a  prisoner? 

Tarleton.    Hold  your  tongue. 

Hypatia.    Keep  your  temper. 

Percival  [coming  between  them]  Lord  Summerhays: 
youll  join  me,  I'm  sure,  in  pointing  out  to  both  father  and 
daughter  that  they  have  now  reached  that  very  common 
stage  in  family  life  at  which  anything  but  a  blow  would  be 
an  anti-climax.  Do  you  seriously  want  to  beat  Patsy, 
Mr  Tarleton? 


100  Misalliance 

Tarleton.  Yes.  I  want  to  thrash  the  life  out  of  her. 
If  she  doesnt  get  out  of  my  reach,  I'll  do  it.  [He  sits  down 
and  grasps  the  writing  table  to  restrain  himself]. 

Hypatia  [coolly  going  to  him  and  leaning  with  her  breast 
on  his  writhing  shoulders]  Oh,  if  you  want  to  beat  me  just 
to  relieve  your  feelings — just  really  and  truly  for  the  fun  of 
it  and  the  satisfaction  of  it,  beat  away.  I  dont  grudge  you 
that. 

Tarleton  [almost  in  hysterics]  I  used  to  think  that  this 
sort  of  thing  went  on  in  other  families  but  that  it  never 
could  happen  in  ours.  And  now —  [He  is  broken  with 
emotion,  and  continues  lamentably]  I  cant  say  the  right 
thing.  I  cant  do  the  right  thing.  I  dont  know  what  is  the 
right  thing.  I'm  beaten;  and  she  knows  it.  Summerhays: 
tell  me  what  to  do. 

Lord  Summerhays.  When  my  council  in  Jinghiskahn 
reached  the  point  of  coming  to  blows,  I  used  to  adjourn 
the  sitting.  Let  us  postpone  the  discussion.  Wait  until 
Monday:  we  shall  have  Sunday  to  quiet  down  in.  Believe 
me,  I'm  not  making  fun  of  you;  but  I  think  theres  some- 
thing in  this  young  gentleman's  advice.     Read  something. 

Tarleton.    I'll  read  King  Lear. 

Hypatia.    Dont.     I'm  very  sorry,  dear. 

Tarleton.  Youre  not.  Youre  laughing  at  me.  Serve 
me  right!  Parents  and  children!  No  man  should  know 
his  own  child.  No  child  should  know  its  own  father.  Let 
the  family  be  rooted  out  of  civilization!  Let  the  human 
race  be  brought  up  in  institutions! 

Hypatia.  Oh  yes.  How  jolly!  You  and  I  might  be 
friends  then;   and  Joey  could  stay  to  dinner. 

Tarleton.  Let  him  stay  to  dinner.  Let  him  stay  to 
breakfast.  Let  him  spend  his  life  here.  Dont  you  say  I 
drove  him  out.     Dont  you  say  I  drove  you  out. 

Percival.  I  really  have  no  right  to  inflict  myself  on 
you.     Dropping  in  as  I  did — 

Tarleton.    Out  of  the  sky.     Ha!     Dropping  in.     The 


Misalliance  101 

new  sport  of  aviation.     You  just  see  a  nice  house;    drop 
in;   scoop  up  the  man's  daughter;   and  off  with  you  again. 

Bentley  comes  back,  with  his  shoulders  hanging  as  if  he  too 
had  been  exercised  to  the  last  pitch  of  fatigue.  He  is  very 
sad.     They  stare  at  him  as  he  gropes  to  PercivaVs  chair. 

Bentley.  I'm  sorry  for  making  a  fool  of  myself.  I  beg 
your  pardon.  Hypatia:  I'm  awfully  sorry;  but  Ive  made 
up  my  mind  that  I'll  never  marry.  [He  sits  down  in  deep 
depression}. 

Hypatia  [running  to  him]  How  nice  of  you,  Bentley! 
Of  course  you  guessed  I  wanted  to  marry  Joey.  What  did 
the  Polish  lady  do  to  you? 

Bentley  [turning  his  head  away]  I'd  rather  not  speak 
of  her,  if  you  dont  mind. 

Hypatia.    Youve  fallen  in  love  with  her.    [She  laughs], 

Bentley.    It's  beastly  of  you  to  laugh. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Youre  not  the  first  to  fall  today 
under  the  lash  of  that  young  lady's  terrible  derision, 
Bentley. 

Lina,  her  cap  on,  and  her  goggles  in  her  hand,  comes  im- 
petuously through  tlie  inner  door. 

Lina  [on  the  steps]  Mr  Percival:  can  we  get  that  aero- 
plane started  again?  [She  comes  down  and  runs  to  the 
pavilion  door].  I  must  get  out  of  this  into  the  air:  right  up 
into  the  blue. 

Percival.  Impossible.  The  frame's  twisted.  The 
petrol  has  given  out:  thats  what  brought  us  down.  And 
how  can  we  get  a  clear  run  to  start  with  among  these 
woods? 

Lina  [swooping  back  through  the  middle  of  the  pavilion] 
We  can  straighten  the  frame.  We  can  buy  petrol  at  the 
Beacon.  With  a  few  laborers  we  can  get  her  out  on  to 
the  Portsmouth  Road  and  start  her  along  that. 

Tarleton  [rising]  But  why  do  you  want  to  leave  us, 
Miss  Szcz? 

Lina.    Old  pal:    this  is  a  stuffy  house.     You  seem  to 


102  Misalliance 

think  of  nothing  but  making  love.  All  the  conversa- 
tion here  is  about  love-making.  All  the  pictures  are  about 
love-making.  The  eyes  of  all  of  you  are  sheep's  eyes. 
You  are  steeped  in  it,  soaked  in  it:  the  very  texts  on  the 
walls  of  your  bedrooms  are  the  ones  about  love.  It  is  dis- 
gusting. It  is  not  healthy.  Your  women  are  kept  idle  and 
dressed  up  for  no  other  purpose  than  to  be  made  love  to. 
I  have  not  been  here  an  hour;  and  already  everybody 
makes  love  to  me  as  if  because  I  am  a  woman  it  were  my 
profession  to  be  made  love  to.  First  you,  old  pal.  I  for- 
gave you  because  you  were  nice  about  your  wife. 

Hypatia.    Oh!  oh!  oh!    Oh,  papa! 

Lina.  Then  you,  Lord  Summerhays,  come  to  me;  and 
all  you  have  to  say  is  to  ask  me  not  to  mention  that  you 
made  love  to  me  in  Vienna  two  years  ago.  I  forgave  you 
because  I  thought  you  were  an  ambassador;  and  all  am- 
bassadors make  love  and  are  very  nice  and  useful  to  people 
who  travel.  Then  this  young  gentleman.  He  is  engaged 
to  this  young  lady;  but  no  matter  for  that:  he  makes  love 
to  me  because  I  carry  him  off  in  my  arms  when  he  cries. 
All  these  I  bore  in  silence.  But  now  comes  your  Johnny 
and  tells  me  I'm  a  ripping  fine  woman,  and  asks  me  to 
marry  him.  I,  Lina  Szczepanowska,  MARRY  him! ! ! ! !  I 
do  not  mind  this  boy:  he  is  a  child:  he  loves  me:  I  should 
have  to  give  him  money  and  take  care  of  him:  that  would 
be  foolish,  but  honorable.  I  do  not  mind  you,  old  pal: 
you  are  what  you  call  an  old — ouf!  but  you  do  not  offer 
to  buy  me:  you  say  until  we  are  tired — until  you  are  so 
happy  that  you  dare  not  ask  for  more.  That  is  foolish  too, 
at  your  age;  but  it  is  an  adventure:  it  is  not  dishonor- 
able. I  do  not  mind  Lord  Summerhays:  it  was  in  Vienna: 
they  had  been  toasting  him  at  a  great  banquet:  he  was 
not  sober.  That  is  bad  for  the  health;  but  it  is  not  dishon- 
orable. But  your  Johnny!  Oh,  your  Johnny!  with  his 
marriage.  He  will  do  the  straight  thing  by  me.  He  will 
give  me  a  home,  a  position.     He  tells  me  I  must  know 


Misalliance  103 

that  my  present  position  is  not  one  for  a  nice  woman. 
This  to  me,  Lina  Szczepanowska!  I  am  an  honest  woman: 
I  earn  my  living.  I  am  a  free  woman:  I  live  in  my  own 
house.  I  am  a  woman  of  the  world:  I  have  thousands  of 
friends:  every  night  crowds  of  people  applaud  me,  delight 
in  me,  buy  my  picture,  pay  hard-earned  money  to  see  me. 
I  am  strong:  I  am  skilful:  I  am  brave:  I  am  independent: 
I  am  unbought:  I  am  all  that  a  woman  ought  to  be;  and 
in  my  family  there  has  not  been  a  single  drunkard  for  four 
generations.  And  this  Englishman!  this  linendraper!  he 
dares  to  ask  me  to  come  and  live  with  him  in  this  rrrrrrrab- 
bit  hutch,  and  take  my  bread  from  his  hand,  and  ask  him 
for  pocket  money,  and  wear  soft  clothes,  and  be  his  woman ! 
his  wife!  Sooner  than  that,  I  would  stoop  to  the  lowest 
depths  of  my  profession.  I  would  stuff  lions  with  food  and 
pretend  to  tame  them.  I  would  deceive  honest  people's 
eyes  with  conjuring  tricks  instead  of  real  feats  of  strength 
and  skill.  I  would  be  a  clown  and  set  bad  examples  of 
conduct  to  little  children.  I  would  sink  yet  lower  and  be 
an  actress  or  an  opera  singer,  imperilling  my  soul  by  the 
wicked  lie  of  pretending  to  be  somebody  else.  All  this  I 
would  do  sooner  than  take  my  bread  from  the  hand  of  a 
man  and  make  him  the  master  of  my  body  and  soul.  And 
so  you  may  tell  your  Johnny  to  buy  an  Englishwoman:  he 
shall  not  buy  Lina  Szczepanowska;  and  I  will  not  stay 
in  the  house  where  such  dishonor  is  offered  me.  Adieu. 
[She  turns  precipitately  to  go,  but  is  faced  in  the  pavilion 
doorway  by  Johnny,  who  comes  in  slowly,  his  hands  in  his 
pockets,    meditating    deeply]. 

Johnny  [confidentially  to  Lina]  You  wont  mention  our 
little  conversation,  Miss  Shepanoska.  It'll  do  no  good; 
and  I'd  rather  you  didnt. 

Tarleton.    Weve  just  heard  about  it,  Johnny. 

J ohnny  [shortly,  but  without  ill-temper]    Oh:   is  that  so? 

Hypatia.  The  cat's  out  of  the  bag,  Johnny,  about 
everybody.     They  were  all  beforehand  with  you:    papa, 


104  Misalliance 

Lord  Summerhays,  Bentley  and  all.     Dont  you  let  them 
laugh  at  you. 

Johnny  [a  grin  slowly  overspreading  his  countenance] 
Well,  theres  no  use  my  pretending  to  be  surprised  at  you, 
Governor,  is  there?  I  hope  you  got  it  as  hot  as  I  did. 
Mind,  Miss  Shepanoska:  it  wasnt  lost  on  me.  I'm  a 
thinking  man.     I  kept  my  temper.     Youll  admit  that. 

Lina  [frankly]  Oh  yes.  I  do  not  quarrel.  You  are  what 
is  called  a  chump;   but  you  are  not  a  bad  sort  of  chump. 

Johnny.  Thank  you.  Well,  if  a  chump  may  have  an 
opinion,  I  should  put  it  at  this.  You  make,  I  suppose,  ten 
pounds  a  night  off  your  own  bat,  Miss  Lina? 

Lina  [scornfully]  Ten  pounds  a  night!  I  have  made  ten 
pounds  a  minute. 

Johnny  [with  increased  respect]  Have  you  indeed?  I 
didnt  know:  youll  excuse  my  mistake,  I  hope.  But  the 
principle  is  the  same.  Now  I  trust  you  wont  be  offended 
at  what  I'm  going  to  say;  but  Ive  thought  about  this  and 
watched  it  in  daily  experience;  and  you  may  take  it  from 
me  that  the  moment  a  woman  becomes  pecuniarily  inde- 
pendent, she  gets  hold  of  the  wrong  end  of  the  stick  in 
moral  questions. 

Lina.  Indeed!  And  what  do  you  conclude  from  that, 
Mister  Johnny? 

Johnny.  Well,  obviously,  that  independence  for  women 
is  wrong  and  shouldnt  be  allowed.  For  their  own  good, 
you  know.  And  for  the  good  of  morality  in  general.  You 
agree  with  me,  Lord  Summerhays,  dont  you? 

Lord  Summerhays.  It's  a  very  moral  moral,  if  I  may  so 
express  myself. 

Mrs  Tarleton  comes  in  softly  through  the  inner  door. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Dont  make  too  much  noise.  The 
lad's  asleep. 

Tarleton.    Chickabiddy:  we  have  some  news  for  you. 
,•  Johnny  [apprehensively]    Now  theres  no  need,  you  know, 
Governor,  to  worry  mother  with  everything  that  passes. 


Misalliance  105 

Mrs  Tarleton  [coming  to  Tarleton]  Whats  been  going 
on?  Dont  you  hold  anything  back  from  me,  John.  What 
have  you  been  doing? 

Tarleton.    Bentley  isnt  going  to  marry  Patsy. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Of  course  not.  Is  that  your  great  news? 
I  never  believed  she'd  marry  him. 

Tarleton.    Theres  something  else.    Mr  Percival  here — 

Mrs  Tarleton  [to  Percival]  Are  you  going  to  marry 
Patsy? 

Percival  [diplomatically]  Patsy  is  going  to  marry  me, 
with  your  permission. 

Mrs  Tarleton.  Oh,  she  has  my  permission:  she  ought 
to  have  been  married  long  ago. 

Hyp ati a.    Mother! 

Tarleton.  Miss  Lina  here,  though  she  has  been  so 
short  a  time  with  us,  has  inspired  a  good  deal  of  attach- 
ment in — I  may  say  in  almost  all  of  us.  Therefore  I  hope 
she'll  stay  to  dinner,  and  not  insist  on  flying  away  in  that 
aeroplane. 

Percival.  You  must  stay,  Miss  Szczepanowska.  I 
cant  go  up  again  this  evening. 

Lina.  Ive  seen  you  work  it.  Do  you  think  I  require 
any  help?  And  Bentley  shall  come  [With  me  as  a 
passenger. 

Bentley  [terrified]    Go  up  in  an  aeroplane!   I  darent. 

Lina.    You  must  learn  to  dare. 

Bentley  [pale  but  heroic]    All  right.     I'll  come. 

No,     no,     Bentley,     impossible.      I 

shall  not  allow  it. 
Do  you  want  to  kill  the  child?    He 
shant  go. 

Bentley.  I  will.  I'll  lie  down  and  yell  until  you  let  me 
go.    I'm  not  a  coward.    I  wont  be  a  coward. 

Lord  Summerhays.  Miss  Szczepanowska:  my  son  is 
very  dear  to  me.  I  implore  you  to  wait  until  tomorrow 
morning. 


Lord  Summer- 
hays 
Mrs  Tarleton 


106  Misalliance 

Lina.  There  may  be  a  storm  tomorrow.  And  I'll  go: 
storm  or  no  storm.     I  must  risk  my  life  tomorrow. 

Bentley.    I  hope  there  will  be  a  storm. 

Lina  [grasping  his  arm]    You  are  trembling. 

Bentley.  Yes:  it's  terror,  sheer  terror.  I  can  hardly 
see.    I  can  hardly  stand.    But  I'll  go  with  you. 

Lina  [slapping  him  on  the  back  and  knocking  a  ghastly 
white  smile  into  his  face]  You  shall.  I  like  you,  my  boy. 
We  go  tomorrow,  together. 

Bentley.    Yes:    together:    tomorrow. 

Tarleton.  Well,  sufficient  unto  the  day  is  the  evil 
thereof.     Read  the  old  book. 

Mrs  Tarleton.    Is  there  anything  else? 

Tarleton.  Well,  I  — er  [he  addresses  Lina,  and  stops]. 
I — er  [he  addresses  Lord  Summerhays,  and  stops].  I  — er 
[he  gives  it  up].  Well,  I  suppose — er — I  suppose  theres 
nothing  more  to  be  said. 

Hypatia  [fervently]    Thank  goodness! 


THE   DARK  LADY  OF  THE 
SONNETS 

XX 

1910 


107 


PREFACE   TO  THE   DARK  LADY 

OF  THE   SONNETS 

How  the  Play  came  to  be  Written 

I  had  better  explain  why,  in  this  little  piece  d'occasion, 
written  for  a  performance  in  aid  of  the  funds  of  the  project 
for  establishing  a  National  Theatre  as  a  memorial  to 
Shakespear,  I  have  identified  the  Dark  Lady  with  Mistress 
Mary  Fitton.  First,  let  me  say  that  I  do  not  contend  that 
the  Dark  Lady  was  Mary  Fitton,  because  when  the  case  in 
Mary's  favor  (or  against  her,  if  you  please  to  consider  that 
the  Dark  Lady  was  no  better  than  she  ought  to  have  been) 
was  complete,  a  portrait  of  Mary  came  to  light  and  turned 
out  to  be  that  of  a  fair  lady,  not  of  a  dark  one.  That 
settles  the  question,  if  the  portrait  is  authentic,  which  I  see 
no  reason  to  doubt,  and  the  lady's  hair  undyed,  which  is 
perhaps  less  certain.  Shakespear  rubbed  in  the  lady's  com- 
plexion in  his  sonnets  mercilessly;  for  in  his  day  black 
hair  was  as  unpopular  as  red  hair  was  in  the  early  days 
of  Queen  Victoria.  Any  tinge  lighter, than  raven  black 
must  be  held  fatal  to  the  strongest  claim  to  be  the  Dark 
Lady.  And  so,  unless  it  can  be  shewn  that  Shakespear's 
sonnets  exasperated  Mary  Fitton  into  dyeing  her  hair  and 
getting  painted  in  false  colors,  I  must  give  up  all  pretence 
that  my  play  is  historical.  The  later  suggestion  of  Mr 
Acheson  that  the  Dark  Lady,  far  from  being  a  maid  of 

109 


110       The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

honor,  kept  a  tavern  in  Oxford  and  was  the  mother  of 
Davenant  the  poet,  is  the  one  I  should  have  adopted  had 
I  wished  to  be  up  to  date.  Why,  then,  did  I  introduce  the 
Dark  Lady  as  Mistress  Fitton? 

Well,  I  had  two  reasons.  The  play  was  not  to  have 
been  written  by  me  at  all,  but  by  Mrs  Alfred  Lyttelton; 
and  it  was  she  who  suggested  a  scene  of  jealousy  between 
Queen  Elizabeth  and  the  Dark  Lady  at  the  expense  of  the 
unfortunate  Bard.  Now  this,  if  the  Dark  Lady  was  a  maid 
of  honor,  was  quite  easy.  If  she  were  a  tavern  landlady,  it 
would  have  strained  all  probability.  So  I  stuck  to  Mary 
Fitton.  But  I  had  another  and  more  personal  reason.  I 
was,  in  a  manner,  present  at  the  birth  of  the  Fitton  theory. 
Its  parent  and  I  had  become  acquainted;  and  he  used  to 
consult  me  on  obscure  passages  in  the  sonnets,  on  which, 
as  far  as  I  can  remember,  I  never  succeeded  in  throwing 
the  faintest  light,  at  a  time  when  nobody  else  thought  my 
opinion,  on  that  or  any  other  subject,  of  the  slightest  im- 
portance. I  thought  it  would  be  friendly  to  immortalize 
him,  as  the  silly  literary  saying  is,  much  as  Shakespear 
immortalized  Mr  W.  H.,  as  he  said  he  would,  simply  by 
writing  about  him. 

Let  me  tell  the  story  formally. 

Thomas  Tyler 

Throughout  the  eighties  at  least,  and  probably  for 
some  years  before,  the  British  Museum  reading  room  was 
used  daily  by  a  gentleman  of  such  astonishing  and  crush- 
ing ugliness  that  no  one  who  had  once  seen  him  could  ever 
thereafter  forget  him.  He  was  of  fair  complexion,  rather 
golden  red  than  sandy;  aged  between  forty-five  and  sixty; 
and  dressed  in  frock  coat  and  tall  hat  of  presentable  but 
never  new  appearance.  His  figure  was  rectangular,  waist- 
less,  neckless,  ankleless,  of  middle  height,  looking  shortish 
because,  though  he  was  not  particularly  stout,  there  was 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        111 

nothing  slender  about  him.  His  ugliness  was  not  unami- 
able;  it  was  accidental,  external,  excrescential.  Attached 
to  his  face  from  the  left  ear  to  the  point  of  his  chin  was 
a  monstrous  goitre,  which  hung  down  to  his  collar  bone, 
and  was  very  inadequately  balanced  by  a  smaller  one  on 
his  right  eyelid.  Nature's  malice  was  so  overdone  in  his 
case  that  it  somehow  failed  to  produce  the  effect  of  re- 
pulsion it  seemed  to  have  aimed  at.  When  you  first  met 
Thomas  Tyler  you  could  think  of  nothing  else  but  whether 
surgery  could  really  do  nothing  for  him.  But  after  a  very 
brief  acquaintance  you  never  thought  of  his  disfigure- 
ments at  all,  and  talked  to  him  as  you  might  to  Romeo  or 
Lovelace;  only,  so  many  people,  especially  women,  would 
not  risk  the  preliminary  ordeal,  that  he  remained  a  man 
apart  and  a  bachelor  all  his  days.  I  am  not  to  be  fright- 
ened or  prejudiced  by  a  tumor;  and  I  struck  up  a  cordial 
acquaintance  with  him,  in  the  course  of  which  he  kept  me 
pretty  closely  on  the  track  of  his  work  at  the  Museum, 
in  which  I  was  then,  like  himself,  a  daily  reader. 

He  was  by  profession  a  man  of  letters  of  an  uncom- 
mercial kind.  He  was  a  specialist  in  pessimism;  had  made 
a  translation  of  Ecclesiastes  of  which  eight  copies  a  year 
were  sold;  and  followed  up  the  pessimism  of  Shakespear 
and  Swift  with  keen  interest.  He  delighted  in  a  hideous 
conception  which  he  called  the  theory  of  the  cycles,  ac- 
cording to  which  the  history  of  mankind  and  the  universe 
keeps  eternally  repeating  itself  without  the  slightest  varia- 
tion throughout  all  eternity;  so  that  he  had  lived  and  died 
and  had  his  goitre  before  and  would  live  and  die  and  have 
it  again  and  again  and  again.  He  liked  to  believe  that 
nothing  that  happened  to  him  was  completely  novel:  he 
was  persuaded  that  he  often  had  some  recollection  of  its 
previous  occurrence  in  the  last  cycle.  He  hunted  out 
allusions  to  this  favorite  theory  in  his  three  favorite  pessi- 
mists. He  tried  his  hand  occasionally  at  deciphering 
ancient  inscriptions,  reading  them  as  people  seem  to  read 


112        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

the  stars,  by  discovering  bears  and  bulls  and  swords  and 
goats  where,  as  it  seems  to  me,  no  sane  human  being  can 
see  anything  but  stars  higgledy-piggledy.  Next  to  the 
translation  of  Ecclesiastes,  his  magnum  opus  was  his  work 
on  Shakespear's  Sonnets,  in  which  he  accepted  a  previous 
identification  of  Mr  W.  H.,  the  "onlie  begetter"  of  the 
sonnets,  with  the  Earl  of  Pembroke  (William  Herbert), 
and  promulgated  his  own  identification  of  Mistress  Mary 
Fitton  with  the  Dark  Lady.  Whether  he  was  right  or 
wrong  about  the  Dark  Lady  did  not  matter  urgently  to 
me:  she  might  have  been  Maria  Tompkins  for  all  I  cared. 
But  Tyler  would  have  it  that  she  was  Mary  Fitton;  and 
he  tracked  Mary  down  from  the  first  of  her  marriages  in 
her  teens  to  her  tomb  in  Cheshire,  whither  he  made  a 
pilgrimage  and  whence  returned  in  triumph  with  a  picture 
of  her  statue,  and  the  news  that  he  was  convinced  she 
was  a  dark  lady  by  traces  of  paint  still  discernible. 

In  due  course  he  published  his  edition  of  the  Sonnets, 
with  the  evidence  he  had  collected.  He  lent  me  a  copy 
of  the  book,  which  I  never  returned.  But  I  reviewed  it  in 
the  Pall  Mall  Gazette  on  the  7th  of  January  1886,  and 
thereby  let  loose  the  Fitton  theory  in  a  wider  circle  of 
readers  than  the  book  could  reach.  Then  Tyler  died, 
sinking  unnoted  like  a  stone  in  the  sea.  I  observed  that 
Mr  Acheson,  Mrs  Davenant's  champion,  calls  him  Rev- 
erend. It  may  very  well  be  that  he  got  his  knowledge  of 
Hebrew  in  reading  for  the  Church;  and  there  was  always 
something  of  the  clergyman  or  the  schoolmaster  in  his 
dress  and  air.  Possibly  he  may  actually  have  been  or- 
dained. But  he  never  told  me  that  or  anything  else  about 
his  affairs;  and  his  black  pessimism  would  have  shot  him 
violently  out  of  any  church  at  present  established  in  the 
West.  We  never  talked  about  affairs:  we  talked  about 
Shakespear,  and  the  Dark  Lady,  and  Swift,  and  Kohe- 
leth,  and  the  cycles,  and  the  mysterious  moments  when  a 
feeling  came  over  us  that  this  had  happened  to  us  before, 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        113 

and  about  the  forgeries  of  the  Pentateuch  which  were 
offered  for  sale  to  the  British  Museum,  and  about  litera- 
ture and  things  of  the  spirit  generally.  He  always  came 
to  my  desk  at  the  Museum  and  spoke  to  me  about  some- 
thing or  other,  no  doubt  finding  that  people  who  were 
keen  on  this  sort  of  conversation  were  rather  scarce.  He 
remains  a  vivid  spot  of  memory  in  the  void  of  my  forget- 
fulness,  a  quite  considerable  and  dignified  soul  in  a  gro- 
tesquely disfiguerd  body. 

Frank  Harris 

To  the  review  in  the  Pall  Mall  Gazette  I  attribute, 
rightly  or  wrongly,  the  introduction  of  Mary  Fitton  to  Mr 
Frank  Harris.  My  reason  for  this  is  that  Mr  Harris  wrote 
a  play  about  Shakespear  and  Mary  Fitton;  and  when  I, 
as  a  pious  duty  to  Tyler's  ghost,  reminded  the  world  that 
it  was  to  Tyler  we  owed  the  Fitton  theory,  Frank  Harris, 
who  clearly  had  not  a  notion  of  what  had  first  put  Mary 
into  his  head,  believed,  I  think,  that  I  had  invented  Tyler 
expressly  for  his  discomfiture;  for  the  stress  I  laid  on 
Tyler's  claims  must  have  seemed  unaccountable  and  per- 
haps malicious  on  the  assumption  that  he  was  to  me  a  mere 
name  among  the  thousands  of  names  in  the  British  Mu- 
seum catalogue.  Therefore  I  make  it  clear  that  I  had  and 
have  personal  reasons  for  remembering  Tyler,  and  for 
regarding  myself  as  in  some  sort  charged  with  the  duty  of 
reminding  the  world  of  his  work.  I  am  sorry  for  his  sake 
that  Mary's  portrait  is  fair,  and  that  Mr  W.  H.  has  veered 
round  again  from  Pembroke  to  Southampton;  but  even  so 
his  work  was  not  wasted:  it  is  by  exhausting  all  the  hy- 
potheses that  we  reach  the  verifiable  one;  and  after  all, 
the  wrong  road  always  leads  somewhere. 

Frank  Harris's  play  was  written  long  before  mine.  I 
read  it  in  manuscript  before  the  Shakespear  Memorial 
National  Theatre  was  mooted;  and  if  there  is  anything 


114        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

except  the  Fitton  theory  (which  is  Tyler's  property)  in 
my  play  which  is  also  in  Mr  Harris's  it  was  I  who  an- 
nexed it  from  him  and  not  he  from  me.  It  does  not  matter 
anyhow,  because  this  play  of  mine  is  a  brief  trifle,  and  full 
of  manifest  impossibilities  at  that;  whilst  Mr  Harris's 
play  is  serious  both  in  size,  intention,  and  quality.  But 
there  could  not  in  the  nature  of  things  be  much  resem- 
blance, because  Frank  conceives  Shakespear  to  have  been 
a  broken-hearted,  melancholy,  enormously  sentimental 
person,  whereas  I  am  convinced  that  he  was  very  like 
myself:  in  fact,  if  I  had  been  born  in  1556  instead  of  in 
1856, 1  should  have  taken  to  blank  verse  and  given  Shakes- 
pear  a  harder  run  for  his  money  than  all  the  other  Eliza- 
bethans put  together.  Yet  the  success  of  Frank  Harris's 
book  on  Shakespear  gave  me  great  delight. 

To  those  who  know  the  literary  world  of  London  there 
was  a  sharp  stroke  of  ironic  comedy  in  the  irresistible  ver- 
dict in  its  favor.  In  critical  literature  there  is  one  prize 
that  is  always  open  to  competition,  one  blue  ribbon  that 
always  carries  the  highest  critical  rank  with  it.  To  win, 
you  must  write  the  best  book  of  your  generation  on  Shakes- 
pear. It  is  felt  on  all  sides  that  to  do  this  a  certain  fastid- 
ious refinement,  a  delicacy  of  taste,  a  correctness  of  man- 
ner and  tone,  and  high  academic  distinction  in  addition  to 
the  indispensable  scholarship  and  literary  reputation,  are 
needed;  and  men  who  pretend  to  these  qualifications  are 
constantly  looked  to  with  a  gentle  expectation  that  pres- 
ently they  will  achieve  the  great  feat.  Now  if  there  is  a 
man  on  earth  who  is  the  utter  contrary  of  everything  that 
this  description  implies;  whose  very  existence  is  an  insult 
to  the  ideal  it  realizes;  whose  eye  disparages,  whose  reso- 
nant voice  denounces,  whose  cold  shoulder  jostles  every 
decency,  every  delicacy,  every  amenity,  every  dignity, 
every  sweet  usage  of  that  quiet  life  of  mutual  admiration 
in  which  perfect  Shakespearian  appreciation  is  expected 
to  arise,  that  man  is  Frank  Harris.     Here  is  one  who  is 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        115 

extraordinarily  qualified,  by  a  range  of  sympathy  and 
understanding  that  extends  from  the  ribaldry  of  a  buc- 
caneer to  the  shyest  tendernesses  of  the  most  sensitive 
poetry,  to  be  all  things  to  all  men,  yet  whose  proud  humor 
it  is  to  be  to  every  man,  provided  the  man  is  eminent  and 
pretentious,  the  champion  of  his  enemies.  To  the  Arch- 
bishop he  is  an  atheist,  to  the  atheist  a  Catholic  mystic, 
to  the  Bismarckian  Imperialist  an  Anacharsis  Klootz,  to 
Anacharsis  Klootz  a  Washington,  to  Mrs  Proudie  a  Don 
Juan,  to  Aspasia  a  John  Knox:  in  short,  to  everyone  his 
complement  rather  than  his  counterpart,  his  antagonist 
rather  than  his  fellow-creature.  Always  provided,  how- 
ever, that  the  persons  thus  confronted  are  respectable 
persons.  Sophie  Perovskaia,  who  perished  on  the  scaffold 
for  blowing  Alexander  II  to  fragments,  may  perhaps  have 
echoed  Hamlet's 

Oh  God,  Horatio,  what  a  wounded  name — 
Things  standing  thus  unknown — I  leave  behind ! 

but  Frank  Harris,  in  his  Sonia,  has  rescued  her  from  that 
injustice,  and  enshrined  her  among  the  saints.  He  has 
lifted  the  Chicago  anarchists  out  of  their  infamy,  and 
shewn  that,  compared  with  the  Capitalism  that  killed 
them,  they  were  heroes  and  martyrs.  He  has  done  this 
with  the  most  unusual  power  of  conviction.  The  story, 
as  he  tells  it,  inevitably  and  irresistibly  displaces  all  the 
vulgar,  mean,  purblind,  spiteful  versions.  There  is  a  pre- 
cise realism  and  an  unsmiling,  measured,  determined  sin- 
cerity which  gives  a  strange  dignity  to  the  work  of  one 
whose  fixed  practice  and  ungovernable  impulse  it  is  to 
kick  conventional  dignity  whenever  he  sees  it. 

Harris  "durch  Mitleid  wissend" 

Frank  Harris  is  everything  except  a  humorist,  not,  ap- 
parently, from  stupidity,  but  because  scorn  overcomes 
humor    in    him.     Nobody    ever    dreamt    of    reproaching 


116       The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

Milton's  Lucifer  for  not  seeing  the  comic  side  of  his  fall: 
and  nobody  who  has  read  Mr  Harris's  stories  desires  to 
have  them  lightened  by  chapters  from  the  hand  of  Arte- 
mus  Ward.  Yet  he  knows  the  taste  and  the  value  of 
humor.  He  was  one  of  the  few  men  of  letters  who  really 
appreciated  Oscar  Wilde,  though  he  did  not  rally  fiercely 
to  Wilde's  side  until  the  world  deserted  Oscar  in  his  ruin. 
I  myself  was  present  at  a  curious  meeting  between  the 
two,  when  Harris,  on  the  eve  of  the  Queensberry  trial, 
prophesied  to  Wilde  with  miraculous  precision  exactly 
what  immediately  afterwards  happened  to  him,  and 
warned  him  to  leave  the  country.  It  was  the  first  time 
within  my  knowledge  that  such  a  forecast  proved  true. 
Wilde,  though  under  no  illusion  as  to  the  folly  of  the  quite 
unselfish  suit-at-law  he  had  been  persuaded  to  begin, 
nevertheless  so  miscalculated  the  force  of  the  social  venge- 
ance he  was  unloosing  on  himself  that  he  fancied  it  could 
be  stayed  by  putting  up  the  editor  of  The  Saturday  Review 
(as  Mr  Harris  then  was)  to  declare  that  he  considered 
Dorian  Grey  a  highly  moral  book,  which  it  certainly  is. 
When  Harris  foretold  him  the  truth,  Wilde  denounced 
him  as  a  fainthearted  friend  who  was  failing  him  in  his 
hour  of  need,  and  left  the  room  in  anger.  Harris's  idiosyn- 
cratic power  of  pity  saved  him  from  feeling  or  shewing 
the  smallest  resentment;  and  events  presently  proved  to 
Wilde  how  insanely  he  had  been  advised  in  taking  the  ac- 
tion, and  how  accurately  Harris  had  gauged  the  situation. 

The  same  capacity  for  pity  governs  Harris's  study  of 
Shakespear,  whom,  as  I  have  said,  he  pities  too  much;  but 
that  he  is  not  insensible  to  humor  is  shewn  not  only  by  his 
appreciation  of  Wilde,  but  by  the  fact  that  the  group  of 
contributors  who  made  his  editorship  of  The  Saturday 
Review  so  remarkable,  and  of  whom  I  speak  none  the  less 
highly  because  I  happened  to  be  one  of  them  myself,  were 
all,  in  their  various  ways,  humorists. 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        117 


"Sidney's  Sister:  Pembroke's  Mother" 

And  now  to  return  to  Shakespear.  Though  Mr  Harris 
followed  Tyler  in  identifying  Mary  Fitton  as  the  Dark 
Lady,  and  the  Earl  of  Pembroke  as  the  addressee  of  the 
other  sonnets  and  the  man  who  made  love  successfully  to 
Shakespear's  mistress,  he  very  characteristically  refuses 
to  follow  Tyler  on  one  point,  though  for  the  life  of  me  I 
cannot  remember  whether  it  was  one  of  the  surmises 
which  Tyler  published,  or  only  one  which  he  submitted  to 
me  to  see  what  I  would  say  about  it,  just  as  he  used  to 
submit  difficult  lines  from  the  sonnets. 

This  surmise  was  that  "Sidney's  sister:  Pembroke's 
mother"  set  Shakespear  on  to  persuade  Pembroke  to 
marry,  and  that  this  was  the  explanation  of  those  earlier 
sonnets  which  so  persistently  and  unnaturally  urged  matri- 
mony on  Mr  W.  H.  I  take  this  to  be  one  of  the  brightest 
of  Tyler's  ideas,  because  the  persuasions  in  the  sonnets 
are  unaccountable  and  out  of  character  unless  they  were 
offered  to  please  somebody  whom  Shakespear  desired  to 
please,  and  who  took  a  motherly  interest  in  Pembroke. 
There  is  a  further  temptation  in  the  theory  for  me.  The 
most  charming  of  all  Shakespear's  old  women,  indeed  the 
most  charming  of  all  his  women,  young  or  old,  is  the 
Countess  of  Rousillon  in  All's  Well  That  Ends  Well.  It 
has  a  certain  individuality  among  them  which  suggests  a 
portrait.  Mr  Harris  will  have  it  that  all  Shakespear's 
nice  old  women  are  drawn  from  his  beloved  mother;  but 
I  see  no  evidence  whatever  that  Shakespear's  mother  was 
a  particularly  nice  woman  or  that  he  was  particularly 
fond  of  her.  That  she  was  a  simple  incarnation  of  ex- 
travagant maternal  pride  like  the  mother  of  Coriolanus 
in  Plutarch,  as  Mr  Harris  asserts,  I  cannot  believe:  she  is 
quite  as  likely  to  have  borne  her  son  a  grudge  for  becom- 
ing "one  of  these  harlotry  players"  and  disgracing  the 


118        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

Ardens.  Anyhow,  as  a  conjectural  model  for  the  Countess 
of  Rousillon,  I  prefer  that  one  of  whom  Jonson  wrote 

Sidney's  sister:  Pembroke's  mother: 
Death:  ere  thou  has  slain  another, 
Learnd  and  fair  and  good  as  she, 
Time  shall  throw  a  dart  at  thee. 

But  Frank  will  not  have  her  at  any  price,  because  his  ideal 
Shakespear  is  rather  like  a  sailor  in  a  melodrama;  and  a 
sailor  in  a  melodrama  must  adore  his  mother.  I  do  not  at 
all  belittle  such  sailors.  They  are  the  emblems  of  human 
generosity;  but  Shakespear  was  not  an  emblem:  he  was  a 
man  and  the  author  of  Hamlet,  who  had  no  illusions  about 
his  mother.     In  weak  moments  one  almost  wishes  he  had. 

Shakespear's  Social  Standing 

On  the  vexed  question  of  Shakespear's  social  standing 
Mr  Harris  says  that  Shakespear  "had  not  had  the  ad- 
vantage of  a  middle-class  training."  I  suggest  that 
Shakespear  missed  this  questionable  advantage,  not  be- 
cause he  was  socially  too  low  to  have  attained  to  it,  but 
because  he  conceived  himself  as  belonging  to  the  upper 
class  from  which  our  public  school  boys  are  now  drawn. 
Let  Mr  Harris  survey  for  a  moment  the  field  of  contem- 
porary journalism.  He  will  see  there  some  men  who  have 
the  very  characteristics  from  which  he  infers  that  Shake- 
spear was  at  a  social  disadvantage  through  his  lack  of 
middle-class  training.  They  are  rowdy,  ill-mannered, 
abusive,  mischievous,  fond  of  quoting  obscene  schoolboy 
anecdotes,  adepts  in  that  sort  of  blackmail  which  consists 
in  mercilessly  libelling  and  insulting  every  writer  whose 
opinions  are  sufficiently  heterodox  to  make  it  almost  im- 
possible for  him  to  risk  perhaps  five  years  of  a  slender  in- 
come by  an  appeal  to  a  prejudiced  orthodox  jury;  and 
they  see  nothing  in  all  this  cruel  blackguardism  but  an 
uproariously  jolly  rag,   although  they  are  by  no  means 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        119 

without  genuine  literary  ability,  a  love  of  letters,  and  even 
some  artistic  conscience.  But  he  will  find  not  one  of  the 
models  of  his  type  (I  say  nothing  of  mere  imitators  of  it) 
below  the  rank  that  looks  at  the  middle  class,  not  humbly 
and  enviously  from  below,  but  insolently  from  above. 
Mr  Harris  himself  notes  Shakespear's  contempt  for  the 
tradesman  and  mechanic,  and  his  incorrigible  addiction  to 
smutty  jokes.  He  does  us  the  public  service  of  sweeping 
away  the  familiar  plea  of  the  Bardolatrous  ignoramus, 
that  Shakespear's  coarseness  was  part  of  the  manners  of 
his  time,  putting  his  pen  with  precision  on  the  one  name, 
Spenser,  that  is  necessary  to  expose  such  a  libel  on  Eliza- 
bethan decency.  There  was  nothing  whatever  to  pre- 
vent Shakespear  from  being  as  decent  as  More  was  before 
him,  or  Bunyan  after  him,  and  as  self-respecting  as  Raleigh 
or  Sidney,  except  the  tradition  of  his  class,  in  which  edu- 
cation or  statesmanship  may  no  doubt  be  acquired  by 
those  who  have  a  turn  for  them,  but  in  which  insolence, 
derision,  profligacy,  obscene  jesting,  debt  contracting,  and 
rowdy  mischievousness,  give  continual  scandal  to  the 
pious,  serious,  industrious,  solvent  bourgeois.  No  other 
class  is  infatuated  enough  to  believe  that  gentlemen  are 
born  and  not  made  by  a  very  elaborate  process  of  culture. 
Even  kings  are  taught  and  coached  and  drilled  from  their 
earliest  boyhood  to  play  their  part.  But  the  man  of 
family  (I  am  convinced  that  Shakespear  took  that  view 
of  himself)  will  plunge  into  society  without  a  lesson  in 
table  manners,  into  politics  without  a  lesson  in  history, 
into  the  city  without  a  lesson  in  business,  and  into  the 
army  without  a  lesson  in  honor. 

It  has  been  said,  with  the  object  of  proving  Shakespear 
a  laborer,  that  he  could  hardly  write  his  name.  Why? 
Because  he  "had  not  the  advantage  of  a  middle-class 
training."  Shakespear  himself  tells  us,  through  Hamlet, 
that  gentlemen  purposely  wrote  badly  lest  they  should  be 
mistaken  for  scriveners;  but  most  of  them,  then  as  now, 


120        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

wrote  badly  because  they  could  not  write  any  better.  In 
short,  the  whole  range  of  Shakespear's  foibles:  the  snob- 
bishness, the  naughtiness,  the  contempt  for  tradesmen 
and  mechanics,  the  assumption  that  witty  conversation 
can  only  mean  smutty  conversation,  the  flunkeyism 
towards  social  superiors  and  insolence  towards  social 
inferiors,  the  easy  ways  with  servants  which  is  seen  not 
only  between  The  Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona  and  their 
valets,  but  in  the  affection  and  respect  inspired  by  a  great 
servant  like  Adam:  all  these  are  the  characteristics  of 
Eton  and  Harrow,  not  of  the  public  elementary  or  private 
adventure  school.  They  prove,  as  everything  we  know 
about  Shakespear  suggests,  that  he  thought  of  the  Shake- 
spears  and  Ardens  as  families  of  consequence,  and  re- 
garded himself  as  a  gentleman  under  a  cloud  through  his 
father's  ill  luck  in  business,  and  never  for  a  moment  as  a 
man  of  the  people.  This  is  at  once  the  explanation  of 
and  excuse  for  his  snobbery.  He  was  not  a  parvenu  try- 
ing to  cover  his  humble  origin  with  a  purchased  coat  of 
arms:  he  was  a  gentleman  resuming  what  he  conceived 
to  be  his  natural  position  as  soon  as  he  gained  the  means 
to  keep  it  up. 

This  Side  Idolatry 

There  is  another  matter  which  I  think  Mr  Harris  should 
ponder.  He  says  that  Shakespear  was  but  "little  es- 
teemed by  his  own  generation."  He  even  describes 
Jonson's  description  of  his  "little  Latin  and  less  Greek" 
as  a  sneer,  whereas  it  occurs  in  an  unmistakably  sincere 
eulogy  of  Shakespear,  written  after  his  death,  and  is 
clearly  meant  to  heighten  the  impression  of  Shakespear's 
prodigious  natural  endowments  by  pointing  out  that  they 
were  not  due  to  scholastic  acquirements.  Now  there  is  a 
sense  in  which  it  is  true  enough  that  Shakespear  was  too 
little  esteemed  by  his  own  generation,  or,  for  the  matter 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        121 

of  that,  by  any  subsequent  generation.  The  bargees  on 
the  Regent's  Canal  do  not  chant  Shakespear's  verses  as  the 
gondoliers  in  Venice  are  said  to  chant  the  verses  of  Tasso 
(a  practice  which  was  suspended  for  some  reason  during 
my  stay  in  Venice:  at  least  no  gondolier  ever  did  it  in  my 
hearing).  Shakespear  is  no  more  a  popular  author  than 
Rodin  is  a  popular  sculptor  or  Richard  Strauss  a  popular 
composer.  But  Shakespear  was  certainly  not  such  a  fool 
as  to  expect  the  Toms,  Dicks,  and  Harrys  of  his  time  to 
be  any  more  interested  in  dramatic  poetry  than  Newton, 
later  on,  expected  them  to  be  interested  in  fluxions.  And 
when  we  come  to  the  question  whether  Shakespear  missed 
that  assurance  which  all  great  men  have  had  from  the 
more  capable  and  susceptible  members  of  their  generation 
that  they  were  great  men,  Ben  Jonson's  evidence  disposes 
of  so  improbable  a  notion  at  once  and  for  ever.  "I  loved 
the  man,"  says  Ben,  "this  side  idolatry,  as  well  as  any." 
Now  why  in  the  name  of  common  sense  should  he  have 
made  that  qualification  unless  there  had  been,  not  only 
idolatry,  but  idolatry  fulsome  enough  to  irritate  Jonson 
into  an  express  disavowal  of  it?  Jonson,  the  bricklayer, 
must  have  felt  sore  sometimes  when  Shakespear  spoke 
and  wrote  of  bricklayers  as  his  inferiors.  He  must  have 
felt  it  a  little  hard  that  being  a  better  scholar,  and  perhaps 
a  braver  and  tougher  man  physically  than  Shakespear, 
he  was  not  so  successful  or  so  well  liked.  But  in  spite  of 
this  he  praised  Shakespear  to  the  utmost  stretch  of  his 
powers  of  eulogy:  in  fact,  notwithstanding  his  disclaimer, 
he  did  not  stop  "this  side  idolatry."  If,  therefore,  even 
Jonson  felt  himself  forced  to  clear  himself  of  extravagance 
and  absurdity  in  his  appreciation  of  Shakespear,  there 
must  have  been  many  people  about  who  idolized  Shake- 
spear as  American  ladies  idolize  Paderewski,  and  who 
carried  Bardolatry,  even  in  the  Bard's  own  time,  to  an 
extent  that  threatened  to  make  his  reasonable  admirers 
ridiculous. 


122        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 
Shakespear's  Pessimism 

I  submit  to  Mr  Harris  that  by  ruling  out  this  idolatry, 
and  its  possible  effect  in  making  Shakespear  think  that  his 
public  would  stand  anything  from  him,  he  has  ruled  out 
a  far  more  plausible  explanation  of  the  faults  of  such  a  play 
as  Timon  of  Athens  than  his  theory  that  Shakespear's 
passion  for  the  Dark  Lady  "cankered  and  took  on  proud 
flesh  in  him,  and  tortured  him  to  nervous  breakdown  and 
madness."  In  Timon  the  intellectual  bankruptcy  is 
obvious  enough:  Shakespear  tried  once  too  often  to  make 
a  play  out  of  the  cheap  pessimism  which  is  thrown  into 
despair  by  a  comparison  of  actual  human  nature  with 
theoretical  morality,  actual  law  and  administration  with 
abstract  justice,  and  so  forth.  But  Shakespear's  percep- 
tion of  the  fact  that  all  men,  judged  by  the  moral  standard 
which  they  apply  to  others  and  by  which  they  justify  their 
punishment  of  others,  are  fools  and  scoundrels,  does  not 
date  from  the  Dark  Lady  complication:  he  seems  to  have 
been  born  with  it.  If  in  The  Comedy  of  Errors  and  A 
Midsummer  Night's  Dream  the  persons  of  the  drama  are 
not  quite  so  ready  for  treachery  and  murder  as  Laertes 
and  even  Hamlet  himself  (not  to  mention  the  procession 
of  ruffians  who  pass  through  the  latest  plays)  it  is  cer- 
tainly not  because  they  have  any  more  regard  for  law  or 
religion.  There  is  only  one  place  in  Shakespear's  plays 
where  the  sense  of  shame  is  used  as  a  human  attribute; 
and  that  is  where  Hamlet  is  ashamed,  not  of  anything  he 
himself  has  done,  but  of  his  mother's  relations  with  his 
uncle.  This  scene  is  an  unnatural  one:  the  son's  re- 
proaches to  his  mother,  even  the  fact  of  his  being  able  to 
discuss  the  subject  with  her,  is  more  repulsive  than  her 
relations  with  her  deceased  husband's  brother. 

Here,  too,  Shakespear  betrays  for  once  his  religious 
sense  by  making  Hamlet,  in  his  agony  of  shame,  declare 
that  his  mother's  conduct  makes  "sweet  religion  a  rhap- 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        123 

sody  of  words."  But  for  that  passage  we  might  almost 
suppose  that  the  feeling  of  Sunday  morning  in  the  country 
which  Orlando  describes  so  perfectly  in  As  You  Like  It 
was  the  beginning  and  end  of  Shakespear's  notion  of 
religion.  I  say  almost,  because  Isabella  in  Measure  for 
Measure  has  religious  charm,  in  spite  of  the  conventional 
theatrical  assumption  that  female  religion  means  an  in- 
humanly ferocious  chastity.  But  for  the  most  part 
Shakespear  differentiates  his  heroes  from  his  villains  much 
more  by  what  they  do  than  by  what  they  are.  Don  John 
in  Much  Ado  is  a  true  villain:  a  man  with  a  malicious 
will;  but  he  is  too  dull  a  duffer  to  be  of  any  use  in  a  lead- 
ing part;  and  when  we  come  to  the  great  villains  like 
Macbeth,  we  find,  as  Mr  Harris  points  out,  that  they  are 
precisely  identical  with  the  heroes:  Macbeth  is  only 
Hamlet  incongruously  committing  murders  and  engaging 
in  hand-to-hand  combats.  And  Hamlet,  who  does  not 
dream  of  apologizing  for  the  three  murders  he  commits,  is 
always  apologizing  because  he  has  not  yet  committed  a 
fourth,  and  finds,  to  his  great  bewilderment,  that  he  does 
not  want  to  commit  it.  "It  cannot  be,"  he  says,  "but  I 
am  pigeon-livered,  and  lack  gall  to  make  oppression  bitter; 
else,  ere  this,  I  should  have  fatted  all  the  region  kites  with 
this  slave's  offal."  Really  one  is  tempted  to  suspect  that 
when  Shylock  asks  "Hates  any  man  the  thing  he  would 
not  kill?"  he  is  expressing  the  natural  and  proper  senti- 
ments of  the  human  race  as  Shakespear  understood  them, 
and  not  the  vindictiveness  of  a  stage  Jew. 


"e>v 


Gaiety  of  Genius 

In  view  of  these  facts,  it  is  dangerous  to  cite  Shake- 
spear's pessimism  as  evidence  of  the  despair  of  a  heart 
broken  by  the  Dark  Lady.  There  is  an  irrepressible 
gaiety  of  genius  which  enables  it  to  bear  the  whole  weight 
of    the    world's    misery    without    blenching.     There    is    a 


124       The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

laugh  always  ready  to  avenge  its  tears  of  discouragement. 
In  the  lines  which  Mr  Harris  quotes  only  to  declare  that 
he  can  make  nothing  of  them,  and  to  condemn  them  as 
out  of  character,  Richard  III,  immediately  after  pitying 
himself  because 

There  is  no  creature  loves  me 
And  if  I  die  no  soul  will  pity  me, 

adds,  with  a  grin, 

Nay,  wherefore  should  they,  since  that  I  myself 
Find  in  myself  no  pity  for  myself? 

Let  me  again  remind  Mr  Harris  of  Oscar  Wilde.  We 
all  dreaded  to  read  De  Profundis:  our  instinct  was  to  stop 
our  ears,  or  run  away  from  the  wail  of  a  broken,  though  by 
no  means  contrite,  heart.  But  we  were  throwing  away  our 
pity.  De  Profundis  was  de  profundis  indeed:  Wilde  was 
too  good  a  dramatist  to  throw  away  so  powerful  an  effect; 
but  none  the  less  it  was  de  profundis  in  excelsis.  There 
was  more  laughter  between  the  lines  of  that  book  than  in 
a  thousand  farces  by  men  of  no  genius.  Wilde,  like 
Richard  and  Shakespear,  found  in  himself  no  pity  for  him- 
self. There  is  nothing  that  marks  the  born  dramatist 
more  unmistakably  than  this  discovery  of  comedy  in  his 
own  misfortunes  almost  in  proportion  to  the  pathos  with 
which  the  ordinary  man  announces  their  tragedy.  I  can- 
not for  the  life  of  me  see  the  broken  heart  in  Shakespear's 
latest  works.  "Hark,  hark!  the  lark  at  heaven's  gate 
sings"  is  not  the  lyric  of  a  broken  man;  nor  is  Cloten's 
comment  that  if  Imogen  does  not  appreciate  it,  "it  is  a 
vice  in  her  ears  which  horse  hairs,  and  cats'  guts,  and  the 
voice  of  unpaved  eunuch  to  boot,  can  never  amend,"  the 
sally  of  a  saddened  one.  Is  it  not  clear  that  to  the  last 
there  was  in  Shakespear  an  incorrigible  divine  levity,  an 
inexhaustible  joy  that  derided  sorrow?  Think  of  the  poor 
Dark  Lady  having  to  stand  up  to  this  unbearable  power 
of  extracting  a  grim  fun  from  everything.     Mr  Harris 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        125 

writes  as  if  Shakespear  did  all  the  suffering  and  the  Dark 
Lady  all  the  cruelty.  But  why  does  he  not  put  himself 
in  the  Dark  Lady's  place  for  a  moment  as  he  has  put  him- 
self so  successfully  in  Shakespear's?  Imagine  her  read- 
ing the  hundred  and  thirtieth  sonnet! 

My  mistress'  eyes  are  nothing  like  the  sun; 

Coral  is  far  more  red  than  her  lips'  red; 

If  snow  be  white,  why  then  her  breasts  are  dun; 

If  hairs  be  wire,  black  wires  grow  on  her  head; 

I  have  seen  roses  damasked,  red  and  white, 

But  no  such  roses  see  I  in  her  cheeks; 

And  in  some  perfumes  is  there  more  delight 

Than  in  the  breath  that  from  my  mistress  reeks. 

I  love  to  hear  her  speak;  yet  well  I  know 

That  music  hath  a  far  more  pleasing  sound. 

I  grant  I  never  saw  a  goddess  go: 

My  mistress,  when  she  walks,  treads  on  the  ground. 
And  yet,  by  heaven,  I  think  my  love  as  rare 
As  any  she  belied  with  false  compare. 

Take  this  as  a  sample  of  the  sort  of  compliment  from  which 
she  was  never  for  a  moment  safe  with  Shakespear.  Bear  in 
mind  that  she  was  not  a  comedian;  that  the  Elizabethan 
fashion  of  treating  brunettes  as  ugly  woman  must  have 
made  her  rather  sore  on  the  subject  of  her  complexion; 
that  no  human  being,  male  or  female,  can  conceivably 
enjoy  being  chaffed  on  that  point  in  the  fourth  couplet 
about  the  perfumes;  that  Shakespear's  revulsions,  as  the 
sonnet  immediately  preceding  shews,  were  as  violent  as 
his  ardors,  and  were  expressed  with  the  realistic  power  and 
horror  that  makes  Hamlet  say  that  the  heavens  got  sick 
when  they  saw  the  queen's  conduct;  and  then  ask  Mr 
Harris  whether  any  woman  could  have  stood  it  for  long, 
or  have  thought  the  "sugred"  compliment  worth  the 
cruel  wounds,  the  cleaving  of  the  heart  in  twain,  that 
seemed  to  Shakespear  as  natural  and  amusing  a  reaction 
as  the  burlesquing  of  his  heroics  by  Pistol,  his  sermons 
by  Falstaff,  and  his  poems  by  Cloten  and  Touchstone. 


126        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 
Jupiter  and  Semele 

This  does  not  mean  that  Shakespear  was  cruel:  evidently 
he  was  not;  but  it  was  not  cruelty  that  made  Jupiter  re- 
duce Semele  to  ashes:  it  was  the  fact  that  he  could  not 
help  being  a  god  nor  she  help  being  a  mortal.  The  one 
thing  Shakespear's  passion  for  the  Dark  Lady  was  not, 
was  what  Mr  Harris  in  one  passage  calls  it :  idolatrous.  If 
it  had  been,  she  might  have  been  able  to  stand  it.  The 
man  who  "dotes  yet  doubts,  suspects,  yet  strongly  loves," 
is  tolerable  even  by  a  spoilt  and  tyrannical  mistress;  but 
what  woman  could  possibly  endure  a  man  who  dotes 
without  doubting;  who  knows,  and  who  is  hugely  amused 
at  the  absurdity  of  his  infatuation  for  a  woman  of  whose 
mortal  imperfections  not  one  escapes  him:  a  man  always 
exchanging  grins  with  Yorick's  skull,  and  inviting  "my 
lady"  to  laugh  at  the  sepulchral  humor  of  the  fact  that 
though  she  paint  an  inch  thick  (which  the  Dark  Lady  may 
have  done),  to  Yorick's  favor  she  must  come  at  last.  To 
the  Dark  Lady  he  must  sometimes  have  seemed  cruel  be- 
yond description:  an  intellectual  Caliban.  True,  a  Cali- 
ban who  could  say 

Be  not  afeard:  the  isle  is  full  of  noises 

Sounds  and  sweet  airs  that  give  delight  and  hurt  not. 

Sometimes  a  thousand  twangling  instruments 

Will  hum  about  mine  ears;  and  sometimes  voices, 

That,  if  I  then  had  waked  after  long  sleep 

Will  make  me  sleep  again;  and  then,  in  dreaming, 

The  clouds,  methought,  would  open  and  shew  riches 

Ready  to  drop  on  me:  that  when  I  wak'd 

I  cried  to  dream  again. 

which  is  very  lovely ;  but  the  Dark  Lady  may  have  had  that 
vice  in  her  ears  which  Cloten  dreaded:  she  may  not  have 
seen  the  beauty  of  it,  whereas  there  can  be  no  doubt  at  all 
that  of  "My  mistress'  eyes  are  nothing  like  the  sun,"  &c, 
not  a  word  was  lost  on  her. 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        127 

And  is  it  to  be  supposed  that  Shakespear  was  too  stupid 
or  too  modest  not  to  see  at  last  that  it  was  a  case  of  Jupiter 
and  Semele?  Shakespear  was  most  certainly  not  modest 
in  that  sense.  The  timid  cough  of  the  minor  poet  was 
never  heard  from  him. 

Not  marble,  nor  the  gilded  monuments 

Of  princes,  shall  outlive  this  powerful  rhyme 

is  only  one  out  of  a  dozen  passages  in  which  he  (possibly 
with  a  keen  sense  of  the  fun  of  scandalizing  the  modest 
coughers)  proclaimed  his  place  and  his  power  in  "the  wide 
world  dreaming  of  things  to  come."  The  Dark  Lady 
most  likely  thought  this  side  of  him  insufferably  con- 
ceited; for  there  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  she  liked  his 
plays  any  better  than  Minna  Wagner  liked  Richard's 
music  dramas:  as  likely  as  not,  she  thought  The  Spanish 
Tragedy  worth  six  Hamlets.  He  was  not  stupid  either: 
if  his  class  limitations  and  a  profession  that  cut  him  off 
from  actual  participation  in  great  affairs  of  State  had  not 
confined  his  opportunities  of  intellectual  and  political 
training  to  private  conversation  and  to  the  Mermaid 
Tavern,  he  would  probably  have  become  one  of  the  ablest 
men  of  his  time  instead  of  being  merely  its  ablest  play- 
wright. One  might  surmise  that  Shakespear  found  out 
that  the  Dark  Lady's  brains  could  no  more  keep  pace 
with  his  than  Anne  Hathaway's,  if  there  were  any  evi- 
dence that  their  friendship  ceased  when  he  stopped  writing 
sonnets  to  her.  As  a  matter  of  fact  the  consolidation  of 
a  passion  into  an  enduring  intimacy  generally  puts  an 
end  to  sonnets. 

That  the  Dark  Lady  broke  Shakespear's  heart,  as  Mr 
Harris  will  have  it  she  did,  is  an  extremely  unShake- 
spearian  hypothesis.  "Men  have  died  from  time  to  time, 
and  worms  have  eaten  them;  but  not  for  love,"  says 
Rosalind.     Richard  of  Gloster,  into  whom  Shakespear  put 


128        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

all  his  own  impish  superiority  to  vulgar  sentiment, 
exclaims 

And  this  word  "love,"  which  greybeards  call  divine, 
Be  resident  in  men  like  one  another 
And  not  in  me:  I  am  myself  alone. 

Hamlet  has  not  a  tear  for  Ophelia:  her  death  moves  him 
to  fierce  disgust  for  the  sentimentality  of  Laertes  by  her 
grave;  and  when  he  discusses  the  scene  with  Horatio 
immediately  after,  he  utterly  forgets  her,  though  he  is 
sorry  he  forgot  himself,  and  jumps  at  the  proposal  of  a 
fencing  match  to  finish  the  day  with.  As  against  this 
view  Mr  Harris  pleads  Romeo,  Orsino,  and  even  Antonio; 
and  he  does  it  so  penetratingly  that  he  convinces  you  that 
Shakespear  did  betray  himself  again  and  again  in  these 
characters;  but  self-betrayal  is  one  thing;  and  self- 
portrayal,  as  in  Hamlet  and  Mercutio,  is  another.  Shake- 
spear never  "saw  himself,"  as  actors  say,  in  Romeo  or 
Orsino  or  Antonio.  In  Mr  Harris's  own  play  Shakespear 
is  presented  with  the  most  pathetic  tenderness.  He  is 
tragic,  bitter,  pitiable,  wretched  and  broken  among  a 
robust  crowd  of  Jonsons  and  Elizabeths;  but  to  me  he  is 
not  Shakespear  because  I  miss  the  Shakespearian  irony 
and  the  Shakespearian  gaiety.  Take  these  away  and 
Shakespear  is  no  longer  Shakespear:  all  the  bite,  the  im- 
petus, the  strength,  the  grim  delight  in  his  own  power  of 
looking  terrible  facts  in  the  face  with  a  chuckle,  is  gone; 
and  you  have  nothing  left  but  that  most  depressing  of  all 
things:  a  victim.  Now  who  can  think  of  Shakespear  as  a 
man  with  a  grievance?  Even  in  that  most  thoroughgoing 
and  inspired  of  all  Shakespear's  loves:  his  love  of  music 
(which  Mr  Harris  has  been  the  first  to  appreciate  at  any- 
thing like  its  value),  there  is  a  dash  of  mockery.  "Spit 
in  the  hole,  man;  and  tune  again."  "Divine  air!  Now 
is  his  soul  ravished.  Is  it  not  strange  that  sheep's  guts 
should  hale  the  souls  out  of  men's  bodies?"     "An  he  had 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets       129 

been  a  dog  that  should  have  howled  thus,  they  would  have 
hanged  him."  There  is  just  as  much  Shakespear  here  as 
in  the  inevitable  quotation  about  the  sweet  south  and 
the  bank  of  violets. 

I  lay  stress  on  this  irony  of  Shakespear's,  this  impish  re- 
joicing in  pessimism,  this  exultation  in  what  breaks  the 
hearts  of  common  men,  not  only  because  it  is  diagnostic 
of  that  immense  energy  of  life  which  we  call  genius,  but 
because  its  omission  is  the  one  glaring  defect  in  Mr  Harris's 
otherwise  extraordinarily  penetrating  book.  Fortunately, 
it  is  an  omission  that  does  not  disable  the  book  as  (in  my 
judgment)  it  disabled  the  hero  of  the  play,  because  Mr 
Harris  left  himself  out  of  his  play,  whereas  he  pervades 
his  book,  mordant,  deep-voiced,  and  with  an  unconquer- 
able style  which  is  the  man. 

The  Idol  of  the  Bardolaters 

There  is  even  an  advantage  in  having  a  book  on  Shake- 
spear with  the  Shakespearian  irony  left  out  of  account.  I 
do  not  say  that  the  missing  chapter  should  not  be  added 
in  the  next  edition:  the  hiatus  is  too  great:  it  leaves  the 
reader  too  uneasy  before  this  touching  picture  of  a  writh- 
ing worm  substituted  for  the  invulnerable  giant.  But  it 
is  none  the  less  probable  that  in  no  other  way  could  Mr 
Harris  have  got  at  his  man  as  he  has.  For,  after  all,  what 
is  the  secret  of  the  hopeless  failure  of  the  academic  Bar- 
dolaters to  give  us  a  credible  or  even  interesting  Shake- 
spear, and  the  easy  triumph  of  Mr  Harris  in  giving  us 
both?  Simply  that  Mr  Harris  has  assumed  that  he  was 
dealing  with  a  man,  whilst  the  others  have  assumed  that 
they  were  writing  about  a  god,  and  have  therefore  re- 
jected every  consideration  of  fact,  tradition,  or  interpreta- 
tion, that  pointed  to  any  human  imperfection  in  their  hero. 
They  thus  leave  themselves  with  so  little  material  that 
they  are  forced  to  begin  by  saying  that  we  know  very 


130       The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

little  about  Shakespear.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  with  the 
plays  and  sonnets  in  our  hands,  we  know  much  more 
about  Shakespear  than  we  know  about  Dickens  or  Thack- 
eray: the  only  difficulty  is  that  we  deliberately  suppress 
it  because  it  proves  that  Shakespear  was  not  only  very 
unlike  the  conception  of  a  god  current  in  Clapham,  but 
was  not,  according  to  the  same  reckoning,  even  a  respect- 
able man.  The  academic  view  starts  with  a  Shakespear 
who  was  not  scurrilous;  therefore  the  verses  about  "lousy 
Lucy"  cannot  have  been  written  by  him,  and  the  cognate 
passages  in  the  plays  are  either  strokes  of  character- 
drawing  or  gags  interpolated  by  the  actors.  This  ideal 
Shakespear  was  too  well  behaved  to  get  drunk;  therefore 
the  tradition  that  his  death  was  hastened  by  a  drinking 
bout  with  Jonson  and  Drayton  must  be  rejected,  and  the 
remorse  of  Cassio  treated  as  a  thing  observed,  not  experi- 
enced: nay,  the  disgust  of  Hamlet  at  the  drinking  cus- 
toms of  Denmark  is  taken  to  establish  Shakespear  as  the 
superior  of  Alexander  in  self-control,  and  the  greatest  of 
teetotallers. 

Now  this  system  of  inventing  your  great  man  to  start 
with,  and  then  rejecting  all  the  materials  that  do  not  fit 
him,  with  the  ridiculous  result  that  you  have  to  declare 
that  there  are  no  materials  at  all  (with  your  waste-paper 
basket  full  of  them),  ends  in  leaving  Shakespear  with  a 
much  worse  character  than  he  deserves.  For  though  it 
does  not  greatly  matter  whether  he  wrote  the  lousy  Lucy 
lines  or  not,  and  does  not  really  matter  at  all  whether  he 
got  drunk  when  he  made  a  night  of  it  with  Jonson  and 
Drayton,  the  sonnets  raise  an  unpleasant  question  which 
does  matter  a  good  deal;  and  the  refusal  of  the  academic 
Bardolaters  to  discuss  or  even  mention  this  question  has 
had  the  effect  of  producing  a  silent  verdict  against  Shake- 
spear. Mr  Harris  tackles  the  question  openly,  and  has  no 
difficulty  whatever  in  convincing  us  that  Shakespear  was 
a  man  of  normal  constitution  sexually,  and  was  not  the 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        131 

victim  of  that  most  cruel  and  pitiable  of  all  the  freaks  of 
nature:  the  freak  which  transposes  the  normal  aim  of  the 
affections.  Silence  on  this  point  means  condemnation; 
and  the  condemnation  has  been  general  throughout  the 
present  generation,  though  it  only  needed  Mr  Harris's 
fearless  handling  of  the  matter  to  sweep  away  what  is 
nothing  but  a  morbid  and  very  disagreeable  modern  fash- 
ion. There  is  always  some  stock  accusation  brought 
against  eminent  persons.  When  I  was  a  boy  every  well- 
known  man  was  accused  of  beating  his  wife.  Later  on, 
for  some  unexplained  reason,  he  was  accused  of  psycho- 
pathic derangement.  And  this  fashion  is  retrospective. 
The  cases  of  Shakespear  and  Michel  Angelo  are  cited  as 
proving  that  every  genius  of  the  first  magnitude  was  a 
sufferer;  and  both  here  and  in  Germany  there  are  circles 
in  which  such  derangement  is  grotesquely  reverenced  as 
part  of  the  stigmata  of  heroic  powers.  All  of  which  is 
gross  nonsense.  Unfortunately,  in  Shakespear's  case, 
prudery,  which  cannot  prevent  the  accusation  from  being 
whispered,  does  prevent  the  refutation  from  being  shouted. 
Mr  Harris,  the  deep-voiced,  refuses  to  be  silenced.  He 
dismisses  with  proper  contempt  the  stupidity  which  places 
an  outrageous  construction  on  Shakespear's  apologies  in 
the  sonnets  for  neglecting  that  "perfect  ceremony"  of 
love  which  consists  in  returning  calls  and  making  protesta- 
tions and  giving  presents  and  paying  the  trumpery  atten- 
tions which  men  of  genius  always  refuse  to  bother  about, 
and  to  which  touchy  people  who  have  no  genius  attach  so 
much  importance.  No  leader  who  had  not  been  tam- 
pered with  by  the  psychopathic  monomaniacs  could  ever 
put  any  construction  but  the  obvious  and  innocent  one  on 
these  passages.  But  the  general  vocabulary  of  the  son- 
nets to  Pembroke  (or  whoever  "Mr  W.  H."  really  was)  is 
so  overcharged  according  to  modern  ideas  that  a  reply  on 
the  general  case  is  necessary. 


132        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

Shakespear's  alleged  Sycophancy  and 
Perversion 

That  reply,  which  Mr  Harris  does  not  hesitate  to  give, 
is  twofold:  first,  that  Shakespear  was,  in  his  attitude 
towards  earls,  a  sycophant;  and,  second,  that  the  nor- 
mality of  Shakespear's  sexual  constitution  is  only  too  well 
attested  by  the  excessive  susceptibility  to  the  normal  im- 
pulse shewn  in  the  whole  mass  of  his  writings.  This  latter 
is  the  really  conclusive  reply.  In  the  case  of  Michel 
Angelo,  for  instance,  one  must  admit  that  if  his  works  are 
set  beside  those  of  Titian  or  Paul  Veronese,  it  is  impossible 
not  to  be  struck  by  the  absence  in  the  Florentine  of  that 
susceptibility  to  feminine  charm  which  pervades  the 
pictures  of  the  Venetians.  But,  as  Mr  Harris  points  out 
(though  he  does  not  use  this  particular  illustration)  Paul 
Veronese  is  an  anchorite  compared  to  Shakespear.  The 
language  of  the  sonnets  addressed  to  Pembroke,  extrava- 
gant as  it  now  seems,  is  the  language  of  compliment  and 
fashion,  transfigured  no  doubt  by  Shakespear's  verbal 
magic,  and  hyperbolical,  as  Shakespear  always  seems  to 
people  who  cannot  conceive  so  vividly  as  he,  but  still  un- 
mistakable for  anything  else  than  the  expression  of  a 
friendship  delicate  enough  to  be  wounded,  and  a  manly 
loyalty  deep  enough  to  be  outraged.  But  the  language 
of  the  sonnets  to  the  Dark  Lady  is  the  language  of 
passion:  their  cruelty  shews  it.  There  is  no  evidence 
that  Shakespear  was  capable  of  being  unkind  in  cold 
blood.  But  in  his  revulsions  from  love,  he  was  bitter, 
wounding,  even  ferocious;  sparing  neither  himself  nor 
the  unfortunate  woman  whose  only  offence  was  that 
she  had  reduced  the  great  man  to  the  common  human 
denominator. 

In  seizing  on  these  two  points  Mr  Harris  has  made  so 
sure  a  stroke,  and  placed  his  evidence  so  featly  that  there 
is  nothing  left  for  me  to  do  but  to  plead  that  the  second  is 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        133 

sounder  than  the  first,  which  is,  I  think,  marked  by  the 
prevalent  mistake  as  to  Shakespear's  social  position,  or, 
if  you  prefer  it,  the  confusion  between  his  actual  social 
position  as  a  penniless  tradesman's  son  taking  to  the 
theatre  for  a  livelihood,  and  his  own  conception  of  him- 
self as  a  gentleman  of  good  family.  I  am  prepared  to  con- 
tend that  though  Shakespear  was  undoubtedly  senti- 
mental in  his  expressions  of  devotion  to  Mr  W.  H.  even 
to  a  point  which  nowadays  makes  both  ridiculous,  he  was 
not  sycophantic  if  Mr  W.  H.  was  really  attractive  and 
promising,  and  Shakespear  deeply  attached  to  him.  A 
sycophant  does  not  tell  his  patron  that  his  fame  will  sur- 
vive, not  in  the  renown  of  his  own  actions,  but  in  the  son- 
nets of  his  sycophant.  A  sycophant,  when  his  patron 
cuts  him  out  in  a  love  affair,  does  not  tell  his  patron 
exactly  what  he  thinks  of  him.  Above  all,  a  sycophant 
does  not  write  to  his  patron  precisely  as  he  feels  on  all 
occasions;  and  this  rare  kind  of  sincerity  is  all  over  the 
sonnets.  Shakespear,  we  are  told,  was  "a  very  civil 
gentleman."  This  must  mean  that  his  desire  to  please 
people  and  be  liked  by  them,  and  his  reluctance  to  hurt 
their  feelings,  led  him  into  amiable  flattery  even  when  his 
feelings  were  not  strongly  stirred.  If  this  be  taken  into 
account  along  with  the  fact  that  Shakespear  conceived  and 
expressed  all  his  emotions  with  a  vehemence  that  some- 
times carried  him  into  ludicrous  extravagance,  making 
Richard  offer  his  kingdom  for  a  horse  and  Othello  declare 
of  Cassio  that 

Had  all  his  hairs  been  lives,  my  great  revenge 
Had  stomach  for  them  all, 

we  shall  see  more  civility  and  hyperbole  than  sycophancy 
even  in  the  earlier  and  more  coldblooded  sonnets. 


134        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 
Shakespear  and  Democracy 

Now  take  the  general  case  pled  against  Shakespear  as 
an  enemy  of  democracy  by  Tolstoy,  the  late  Ernest  Crosbie 
and  others,  and  endorsed  by  Mr  Harris.  Will  it  really 
stand  fire?  Mr  Harris  emphasizes  the  passages  in  which 
Shakespear  spoke  of  mechanics  and  even  of  small  master 
tradesmen  as  base  persons  whose  clothes  were  greasy, 
whose  breath  was  rank,  and  whose  political  imbecility 
and  caprice  moved  Coriolanus  to  say  to  the  Roman  Radi- 
cal who  demanded  at  least  "good  words"  from  him 

He  that  will  give  good  words  to  thee  will  flatter 
Beneath  abhorring. 

But  let  us  be  honest.  As  political  sentiments  these  lines 
are  an  abomination  to  every  democrat.  But  suppose  they 
are  not  political  sentiments!  Suppose  they  are  merely  a 
record  of  observed  fact.  John  Stuart  Mill  told  our  Brit- 
ish workmen  that  they  were  mostly  liars.  Carlyle  told 
us  all  that  we  are  mostly  fools.  Matthew  Arnold  and 
Ruskin  were  more  circumstantial  and  more  abusive. 
Everybody,  including  the  workers  themselves,  know  that 
they  are  dirty,  drunken,  foul-mouthed,  ignorant,  glutton- 
ous, prejudiced :  in  short,  heirs  to  the  peculiar  ills  of  poverty 
and  slavery,  as  well  as  co-heirs  with  the  plutocracy  to  all 
the  failings  of  human  nature.  Even  Shelley  admitted, 
200  years  after  Shakespear  wrote  Coriolanus,  that  univer- 
sal suffrage  was  out  of  the  question.  Surely  the  real  test, 
not  of  Democracy,  which  was  not  a  live  political  issue  in 
Shakespear's  time,  but  of  impartiality  in  judging  classes, 
which  is  what  one  demands  from  a  great  human  poet,  is 
not  that  he  should  flatter  the  poor  and  denounce  the  rich, 
but  that  he  should  weigh  them  both  in  the  same  balance. 
Now  whoever  will  read  Lear  and  Measure  for  Measure 
will  find  stamped  on  his  mind  such  an  appalled  sense  of 
the  danger  of  dressing  man  in  a  little  brief  authority,  such 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        135 

a  merciless  stripping  of  the  purple  from  the  "poor,  bare, 
forked  animal"  that  calls  itself  a  king  and  fancies  itself  a 
god,  that  one  wonders  what  was  the  real  nature  of  the 
mysterious  restraint  that  kept  "Eliza  and  our  James"  from 
teaching  Shakespear  to  be  civil  to  crowned  heads,  just  as 
one  wonders  why  Tolstoy  was  allowed  to  go  free  when  so 
many  less  terrible  levellers  went  to  the  galleys  or  Siberia. 
From  the  mature  Shakespear  we  get  no  such  scenes  of 
village  snobbery  as  that  between  the  stage  country  gentle- 
man Alexander  Iden  and  the  stage  Radical  Jack  Cade. 
We  get  the  shepherd  in  As  You  Like  It,  and  many  honest, 
brave,  human,  and  loyal  servants,  beside  the  inevitable 
comic  ones.  Even  in  the  Jingo  play,  Henry  V,  we  get 
Bates  and  Williams  drawn  with  all  respect  and  honor  as 
normal  rank  and  file  men.  In  Julius  Caesar,  Shakespear 
went  to  work  with  a  will  when  he  took  his  cue  from  Plu- 
tarch in  glorifying  regicide  and  transfiguring  the  republi- 
cans. Indeed  hero-worshippers  have  never  forgiven  him 
for  belittling  Caesar  and  failing  to  see  that  side  of  his  as- 
sassination which  made  Goethe  denounce  it  as  the  most 
senseless  of  crimes.  Put  the  play  beside  the  Charles  I 
of  Wills,  in  which  Cromwell  is  written  down  to  a  point  at 
which  the  Jack  Cade  of  Henry  VI  becomes  a  hero  in  com- 
parison; and  then  believe,  if  you  can,  that  Shakespear 
was  one  of  them  that  "crook  the  pregnant  hinges  of  the 
knee  where  thrift  may  follow  fawning."  Think  of  Rosen- 
crantz,  Guildenstern,  Osric,  the  fop  who  annoyed  Hotspur, 
and  a  dozen  passages  concerning  such  people!  If  such 
evidence  can  prove  anything  (and  Mr  Harris  relies  through- 
out on  such  evidence)  Shakespear  loathed  courtiers. 

If,  on  the  other  hand,  Shakespear's  characters  are  mostly 
members  of  the  leisured  classes,  the  same  thing  is  true  of 
Mr  Harris's  own  plays  and  mine.  Industrial  slavery  is 
not  compatible  with  that  freedom  of  adventure,  that  per- 
sonal refinement  and  intellectual  culture,  that  scope  of 
action,    which   the   higher   and   subtler   drama   demands. 


136        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

Even  Cervantes  had  finally  to  drop  Don  Quixote's  troubles 
with  innkeepers  demanding  to  be  paid  for  his  food  and 
lodging,  and  make  him  as  free  of  economic  difficulties  as 
Amadis  de  Gaul.  Hamlet's  experiences  simply  could  not 
have  happened  to  a  plumber.  A  poor  man  is  useful  on  the 
stage  only  as  a  blind  man  is:  to  excite  sympathy.  The 
poverty  of  the  apothecary  in  Romeo  and  Juliet  produces 
a  great  effect,  and  even  points  the  sound  moral  that  a  poor 
man  cannot  afford  to  have  a  conscience;  but  if  all  the 
characters  of  the  play  had  been  as  poor  as  he,  it  would 
have  been  nothing  but  a  melodrama  of  the  sort  that  the 
Sicilian  players  gave  us  here;  and  that  was  not  the  best 
that  lay  in  Shakespear's  power.  When  poverty  is  abol- 
ished, and  leisure  and  grace  of  life  become  general,  the 
only  plays  surviving  from  our  epoch  which  will  have  any 
relation  to  life  as  it  will  be  lived  then  will  be  those  in  which 
none  of  the  persons  represented  are  troubled  with  want  of 
money  or  wretched  drudgery.  Our  plays  of  poverty  and 
squalor,  now  the  only  ones  that  are  true  to  the  life  of  the 
majority  of  living  men,  will  then  be  classed  with  the  rec- 
ords of  misers  and  monsters,  and  read  only  by  historical 
students  of  social  pathology. 

Then  consider  Shakespear's  kings  and  lords  and  gentle- 
men! Would  even  John  Ball  or  Jeremiah  complain  that 
they  are  flattered?  Surely  a  more  mercilessly  exposed 
string  of  scoundrels  never  crossed  the  stage.  The  very 
monarch  who  paralyzes  a  rebel  by  appealing  to  the  divinity 
that  hedges  a  king,  is  a  drunken  and  sensual  assassin,  and 
is  presently  killed  contemptuously  before  our  eyes  in  spite 
of  his  hedge  of  divinity.  I  could  write  as  convincing  a 
chapter  on  Shakespear's  Dickensian  prejudice  against  the 
throne  and  the  nobility  and  gentry  in  general  as  Mr  Harris 
or  Ernest  Crosbie  on  the  other  side.  I  could  even  go  so 
far  as  to  contend  that  one  of  Shakespear's  defects  is  his 
lack  of  an  intelligent  comprehension  of  feudalism.  He 
had  of  course  no  prevision  of  democratic  Collectivism.     He 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        137 

was,  except  in  the  commonplaces  of  war  and  patriotism, 
a  privateer  through  and  through.  Nobody  in  his  plays, 
whether  king  or  citizen,  has  any  civil  public  business  or 
conception  of  such  a  thing,  except  in  the  method  of  ap- 
pointing constables,  to  the  abuses  in  which  he  called  at- 
tention quite  in  the  vein  of  the  Fabian  Society.  He  was 
concerned  about  drunkenness  and  about  the  idolatry  and 
hypocrisy  of  our  judicial  system;  but  his  implied  remedy 
was  personal  sobriety  and  freedom  from  idolatrous  illusion 
in  so  far  as  he  had  any  remedy  at  all,  and  did  not  merely 
despair  of  human  nature.  His  first  and  last  word  on  par- 
liament was  "Get  thee  glass  eyes,  and,  like  a  scurvy  poli- 
tician, seem  to  see  the  thing  thou  dost  not."  He  had  no 
notion  of  the  feeling  with  which  the  land  nationalizes  of 
today  regard  the  fact  that  he  was  a  party  to  the  enclosure 
of  common  lands  at  Wellcome.  The  explanation  is,  not 
a  general  deficiency  in  his  mind,  but  the  simple  fact  that 
in  his  day  what  English  land  needed  was  individual  ap- 
propriation and  cultivation,  and  what  the  English  Con- 
stitution needed  was  the  incorporation  of  Whig  principles 
of  individual  liberty. 

Shakespear  and  the  British  Public 

I  have  rejected  Mr  Harris's  view  that  Shakespear  died 
broken-hearted  of  "the  pangs  of  love  despised."  I  have 
given  my  reasons  for  believing  that  Shakespear  died  game, 
and  indeed  in  a  state  of  levity  which  would  have  been  con- 
sidered unbecoming  in  a  bishop.  But  Mr  Harris's  evi- 
dence does  prove  that  Shakespear  had  a  grievance  and  a 
very  serious  one.  He  might  have  been  jilted  by  ten  dark 
ladies  and  been  none  the  worse  for  it;  but  his  treatment 
by  the  British  Public  was  another  matter.  The  idolatry 
which  exasperated  Ben  Jonson  was  by  no  means  a  popular 
movement;  and,  like  all  such  idolatries,  it  was  excited  by 
the  magic  of  Shakespear's  art  rather  than  by  his  views. 


138        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

He  was  launched  on  his  career  as  a  successful  playwright 
by  the  Henry  VI  trilogy,  a  work  of  no  originality,  depth, 
or  subtlety  except  the  originality,  depth,  and  subtlety  of 
the  feelings  and  fancies  of  the  common  people.  But 
Shakespear  was  not  satisfied  with  this.  What  is  the  use 
of  being  Shakespear  if  you  are  not  allowed  to  express  any 
notions  but  those  of  Autolycus?  Shakespear  did  not  see 
the  world  as  Autolycus  did:  he  saw  it,  if  not  exactly  as 
Ibsen  did  (for  it  was  not  quite  the  same  world),  at  least 
with  much  of  Ibsen's  power  of  penetrating  its  illusions  and 
idolatries,  and  with  all  Swift's  horror  of  its  cruelty  and 
uncleanliness. 

Now  it  happens  to  some  men  with  these  powers  that 
they  are  forced  to  impose  their  fullest  exercise  on  the 
world  because  they  cannot  produce  popular  work.  Take 
Wagner  and  Ibsen  for  instance!  Their  earlier  works  are 
no  doubt  much  cheaper  than  their  later  ones;  still,  they 
were  not  popular  when  they  were  written.  The  alterna- 
tive of  doing  popular  work  was  never  really  open  to  them: 
had  they  stooped  they  would  have  picked  up  less  than 
they  snatched  from  above  the  people's  heads.  But  Handel 
and  Shakespear  were  not  held  to  their  best  in  this  way. 
They  could  turn  out  anything  they  were  asked  for,  and 
even  heap  up  the  measure.  They  reviled  the  British 
Public,  and  never  forgave  it  for  ignoring  their  best  work 
and  admiring  their  splendid  commonplaces;  but  they 
produced  the  commonplaces  all  the  same,  and  made  them 
sound  magnificent  by  mere  brute  faculty  for  their  art. 
When  Shakespear  was  forced  to  write  popular  plays  to 
save  his  theatre  from  ruin,  he  did  it  mutinously,  calling  the 
plays  "As  You  Like  It,"  and  "Much  Ado  About  Nothing." 
All  the  same,  he  did  it  so  well  that  to  this  day  these  two 
genial  vulgarities  are  the  main  Shakespearian  stock-in- 
trade  of  our  theatres.  Later  on  Burbage's  power  and  pop- 
ularity as  an  actor  enabled  Shakespear  to  free  himself  from 
the  tyranny  of  the  box  office,  and  to  express  himself  more 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        139 

freely  in  plays  consisting  largely  of  monologue  to  be 
spoken  by  a  great  actor  from  whom  the  public  would  stand 
a  good  deal.  The  history  of  Shakespear's  tragedies  has 
thus  been  the  history  of  a  long  line  of  famous  actors,  from 
Burbage  and  Betterton  to  Forbes  Robertson;  and  the 
man  of  whom  we  are  told  that  "when  he  would  have  said 
that  Richard  died,  and  cried  A  horse!  A  horse!  he  Bur- 
bage cried"  was  the  father  of  nine  generations  of  Shake- 
spearian playgoers,  all  speaking  of  Garrick's  Richard,  and 
Kean's  Othello,  and  Irving's  Shylock,  and  Forbes  Robert- 
son's Hamlet  without  knowing  or  caring  how  much  these 
had  to  do  with  Shakespear's  Richard  and  Othello  and  so 
forth.  And  the  plays  which  were  written  without  great 
and  predominant  parts,  such  as  Troilus  and  Cressida,  All's 
Well  That  Ends  Well,  and  Measure  for  Measure,  have 
dropped  on  our  stage  as  dead  as  the  second  part  of  Goethe's 
Faust  or  Ibsen's  Emperor  or  Galilean. 

Here,  then,  Shakespear  had  a  real  grievance;  and  though 
it  is  a  sentimental  exaggeration  to  describe  him  as  a 
broken-hearted  man  in  the  face  of  the  passages  of  reckless 
jollity  and  serenely  happy  poetry  in  his  latest  plays,  yet 
the  discovery  that  his  most  serious  work  could  reach  suc- 
cess only  when  carried  on  the  back  of  a  very  fascinating 
actor  who  was  enormously  overcharging  his  part,  and  that 
the  serious  plays  which  did  not  contain  parts  big  enougli 
to  hold  the  overcharge  were  left  on  the  shelf,  amply  ac- 
counts for  the  evident  fact  that  Shakespear  did  not  end 
his  life  in  a  glow  of  enthusiastic  satisfaction  with  mankind 
and  with  the  theatre,  which  is  all  that  Mr  Harris  can 
allege  in  support  of  his  broken-heart  theory.  But  even 
if  Shakespear  had  had  no  failures,  it  was  not  possible  for  a 
man  of  his  powers  to  observe  the  political  and  moral  con- 
duct of  his  contemporaries  without  perceiving  that  they 
were  incapable  of  dealing  with  the  problems  raised  by  their 
own  civilization,  and  that  their  attempts  to  carry  out  the 
codes  of  law  and  to  practise  the  religions  offered  to  them 


140       The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

by  great  prophets  and  law-givers  were  and  still  are  so 
foolish  that  we  now  call  for  The  Superman,  virtually  a 
new  species,  to  rescue  the  world  from  mismanagement. 
This  is  the  real  sorrow  of  great  men;  and  in  the  face  of  it 
the  notion  that  when  a  great  man  speaks  bitterly  or  looks 
melancholy  he  must  be  troubled  by  a  disappointment  in 
love  seems  to  me  sentimental  trifling. 

If  I  have  carried  the  reader  with  me  thus  far,  he  will 
find  that  trivial  as  this  little  play  of  mine  is,  its  sketch  of 
Shakespear  is  more  complete  than  its  levity  suggests. 
Alas!  its  appeal  for  a  National  Theatre  as  a  monument  to 
Shakespear  failed  to  touch  the  very  stupid  people  who 
cannot  see  that  a  National  Theatre  is  worth  having  for 
the  sake  of  the  National  Soul.  I  had  unfortunately  repre- 
sented Shakespear  as  treasuring  and  using  (as  I  do  myself) 
the  jewels  of  unconsciously  musical  speech  which  common 
people  utter  and  throw  away  every  day;  and  this  was 
taken  as  a  disparagement  of  Shakespear's  "originality." 
Why  was  I  born  with  such  contemporaries?  Why  is 
Shakespear  made  ridiculous  by  such  a  posterity? 


The  Dark  Lady  of  The  Sonnets  was  first  performed 
at  the  Haymarket  Theatre,  on  the  afternoon  of  Thursday,  the 
2Mh  November  1910,  by  Mona  Limerick  as  the  Dark  Lady, 
Suzanne  Sheldon  as  Queen  Elizabeth,  Granville  Barker  as 
Shakespear,  and  Hugh  Tabberer  as  the  Warder. 


THE  DARK  LADY  OF  THE  SONNETS 

Fin  de  siecle  15-1600.  Midsummer  night  on  the  terrace 
of  the  Palace  at  Whitehall,  overlooking  the  Thames.  The 
Palace  clock  chimes  jour  quarters  and  strikes  eleven. 

A  Beefeater  on  guard.     A  Cloaked  Man  approaches. 

The  Beefeater.  Stand.  Who  goes  there?  Give  the 
word. 

The  Man.   Marry!    I  cannot.     I  have  clean  forgotten  it. 

The  Beefeater.  Then  cannot  you  pass  here.  What 
is  your  business?     Who  are  you?    Are  you  a  true  man? 

The  Man.  Far  from  it,  Master  Warder.  I  am  not  the 
same  man  two  days  together:  sometimes  Adam,  some- 
times Benvolio,  and  anon  the  Ghost. 

The  Beefeater  [recoiling]  A  ghost!  Angels  and  min- 
isters of  grace  defend  us! 

The  Man.  Well  said,  Master  Warder.  With  your 
leave  I  will  set  that  down  in  writing;  for  I  have  a  very 
poor  and  unhappy  brain  for  remembrance.  [He  takes  out 
his  tablets  and  writes].  Methinks  this  is  a  good  scene,  with 
you  on  your  lonely  watch,  and  I  approaching  like  a  ghost 
in  the  moonlight.  Stare  not  so  amazedly  at  me;  but  mark 
what  I  say.  I  keep  tryst  here  to-night  with  a  dark  lady. 
She  promised  to  bribe  the  warder.  I  gave  her  the  where- 
withal: four  tickets  for  the  Globe  Theatre. 

The  Beefeater.  Plague  on  her!  She  gave  me  two 
only. 

The  Man    [detaching  a  tablet]  My  friend:    present  this 

141 


142        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

tablet,  and  you  will  be  welcomed  at  any  time  when  the 
plays  of  Will  Shakespear  are  in  hand.  Bring  your  wife. 
Bring  your  friends.  Bring  the  whole  garrison.  There  is 
ever  plenty  of  room. 

The  Beefeater.  I  care  not  for  these  new-fangled 
plays.  No  man  can  understand  a  word  of  them.  They 
are  all  talk.  Will  you  not  give  me  a  pass  for  The  Spanish 
Tragedy? 

The  Man.  To  see  The  Spanish  Tragedy  one  pays,  my 
friend.    Here  are  the  means.    [He  gives  him  a  piece  of  gold]. 

The  Beefeater  [overwhelmed]  Gold!  Oh,  sir,  you  are  a 
better  paymaster  than  your  dark  lady. 

The  Man.    Women  are  thrifty,  my  friend. 

The  Beefeater.  Tis  so,  sir.  And  you  have  to  con- 
sider that  the  most  open  handed  of  us  must  een  cheapen 
that  which  we  buy  every  day.  This  lady  has  to  make  a 
present  to  a  warder  nigh  every  night  of  her  life. 

The  Man  [turning  pale]    I'll  not  believe  it. 

The  Beefeater.  Now  you,  sir,  I  dare  be  sworn,  do  not 
have  an  adventure  like  this  twice  in  the  year. 

The  Man.  Villain:  wouldst  tell  me  that  my  dark  lady 
hath  ever  done  thus  before?  that  she  maketh  occasions 
to  meet  other  men? 

The  Beefeater.  Now  the  Lord  bless  your  innocence, 
sir,  do  you  think  you  are  the  only  pretty  man  in  the  world? 
A  merry  lady,  sir:  a  warm  bit  of  stuff .  Goto:  I'll  not  see 
her  pass  a  deceit  on  a  gentleman  that  hath  given  me  the 
first  piece  of  gold  I  ever  handled. 

The  Man.  Master  Warder:  is  it  not  a  strange  thing 
that  we,  knowing  that  all  women  are  false,  should  be 
amazed  to  find  our  own  particular  drab  no  better  than  the 
rest? 

The  Beefeater.  Not  all,  sir.  Decent  bodies,  many 
of  them. 

The  Man  [intolerantly]  No.  All  false.  All.  If  thou 
deny  it,  thou  liest. 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        143 

The  Beefeater.  You  judge  too  much  by  the  Court, 
sir.  There,  indeed,  you  may  say  of  frailty  that  its  name  is 
woman. 

The  Man  [pulling  out  his  tablets  again]  Prithee  say  that 
again:  that  about  frailty:  the  strain  of  music. 

The  Beefeater.  What  strain  of  music,  sir?  I'm  no 
musician,  God  knows. 

The  Man.  There  is  music  in  your  soul:  many  of  your 
degree  have  it  very  notably.  [Writing]  "Frailty:  thy 
name  is  woman ! "  [Repeating  it  affectionately]  "Thy  name 
is  woman." 

The  Beefeater.  Well,  sir,  it  is  but  four  words.  Are 
you  a  snapper-up  of  such  unconsidered  trifles? 

The  Man  [eagerly]  Snapper-up  of  —  [he  gasps]  Oh! 
Immortal  phrase!  [He  writes  it  down].  This  man  is  a 
greater  than  I. 

The  Beefeater.  You  have  my  lord  Pembroke's  trick, 
sir. 

The  Man.  Like  enough:  he  is  my  near  friend.  But 
what  call  you  his  trick? 

The  Beefeater.  Making  sonnets  by  moonlight.  And 
to  the  same  lady  too. 

The  Man.    No! 

The  Beefeater.  Last  night  he  stood  here  on  your 
errand,  and  in  your  shoes. 

The  Man.    Thou,  too,  Brutus!    And  I  called  him  friend! 

The  Beefeater.    Tis  ever  so,  sir. 

The  Man.  Tis  ever  so.  Twas  ever  so.  [He  turns 
away,  overcome].  Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona!  Judas! 
Judas! ! 

The  Beefeater.    Is  he  so  bad  as  that,  sir? 

The  Man  [recovering  his  charity  and  self-possession] 
Bad?  Oh  no.  Human,  Master  Warder,  human.  We  call 
one  another  names  when  we  are  offended,  as  children  do. 
That  is  all. 

The  Beefeater.    Ay,  sir:   words,  words,  words.     Mere 


144        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

wind,  sir.  We  fill  our  bellies  with  the  east  wind,  sir,  as  the 
Scripture  hath  it.     You  cannot  feed  capons  so. 

The  Man.  A  good  cadence.  By  your  leave  [He  makes 
a  note  of  it]. 

The  Beefeatee.  What  manner  of  thing  is  a  cadence, 
sir?   I  have  not  heard  of  it. 

The  Man.    A  thing  to  rule  the  world  with,  friend. 

The  Beefeater.  You  speak  strangely,  sir:  no  offence. 
But,  an't  like  you,  you  are  a  very  civil  gentleman;  and  a 
poor  man  feels  drawn  to  you,  you  being,  as  twere,  willing 
to  share  your  thought  with  him. 

The  Man.  Tis  my  trade.  But  alas!  the  world  for  the 
most  part  will  none  of  my  thoughts. 

Lamplight  streams  from  the  palace  door  as  it  opens  from 
within. 

The  Beefeater.  Here  comes  your  lady,  sir.  I'll  to 
t'other  end  of  my  ward.  You  may  een  take  your  time  about 
your  business:  I  shall  not  return  too  suddenly  unless  my 
sergeant  comes  prowling  round.  Tis  a  fell  sergeant,  sir: 
strict  in  his  arrest.    Go'd'en,  sir;  and  good  luck!  [He  goes]. 

The  Man.  "Strict  in  his  arrest"!  "Fell  sergeant"! 
[As  if  tasting  a  ripe  plum]  O-o-o-li!  [He  makes  a  note  of 
them]. 

A  Cloaked  Lady  gropes  her  way  from  the  palace  and  wan- 
ders along  the  terrace,  walking  in  her  sleep. 

The  Lady  [rubbing  her  hands  as  if  washing  them]  Out, 
damned  spot.  You  will  mar  all  with  these  cosmetics.  God 
made  you  one  face;  and  you  make  yourself  another. 
Think  of  your  grave,  woman,  not  ever  of  being  beautified. 
All  the  perfumes  of  Arabia  will  not  whiten  this  Tudor  hand. 

The  Man.  "All  the  perfumes  of  Arabia"!  "Beauti- 
fied"! "Beautified"!  a  poem  in  a  single  word.  Can  this 
be  my  Mary?  [To  the  Lady]  Why  do  you  speak  in  a 
strange  voice,  and  utter  poetry  for  the  first  time?  Are  you 
ailing?    You  walk  like  the  dead.     Mary!    Mary! 

The  Lady  [echoing  him]    Mary!     Mary!    Who  would 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        145 

have  thought  that  woman  to  have  had  so  much  blood  in 
her!  Is  it  my  fault  that  my  counsellors  put  deeds  of  blood 
on  me?  Fie!  If  you  were  women  you  would  have  more 
wit  than  to  stain  the  floor  so  foully.  Hold  not  up  her  head 
so:  the  hair  is  false.  I  tell  you  yet  again,  Mary's  buried: 
she  cannot  come  out  of  her  grave.  I  fear  her  not:  these 
cats  that  dare  jump  into  thrones  though  they  be  fit  only 
for  men's  laps  must  be  put  away.  Whats  done  cannot  be 
undone.    Out,  I  say.     Fie!    a  queen,  and  freckled! 

The  Man  [shaking  her  arm]    Mary,  I  say:   art  asleep? 

The  Lady  wakes;  starts;  and  nearly  faints.  He  catches 
her  on  his  arm. 

The  Lady.    Where  am  I?    What  art  thou? 

The  Man.  I  cry  your  mercy.  I  have  mistook  your 
person  all  this  while.  Methought  you  were  my  Mary:  my 
mistress. 

The  Lady  [outraged]    Profane  fellow:  how  do  you  dare? 

The  Man.  Be  not  wroth  with  me,  lady.  My  mistress  is 
a  marvellous  proper  woman.  But  she  does  not  speak  so 
well  as  you.  "All  the  perfumes  of  Arabia"!  That  was 
well  said :  spoken  with  good  accent  and  excellent  discretion. 

The  Lady.    Have  I  been  in  speech  with  you  here? 

The  Man.    Why,  yes,  fair  lady.     Have  you  forgot  it? 

The  Lady.    I  have  walked  in  my  sleep. 

The  Man.  Walk  ever  in  your  sleep,  fair  one;  for  then 
your  words  drop  like  honey. 

The  Lady  [with  cold  majesty]  Know  you  to  whom  you 
speak,  sir,  that  you  dare  express  yourself  so  saucily? 

The  Man  [unabashed]  Not  I,  not  care  neither.  You 
are  some  lady  of  the  Court,  belike.  To  me  there  are  but 
two  sorts  of  women :  those  with  excellent  voices,  sweet  and 
low,  and  cackling  hens  that  cannot  make  me  dream.  Your 
voice  has  all  manner  of  loveliness  in  it.  Grudge  me  not  a 
short  hour  of  its  music. 

The  Lady.  Sir:  you  are  overbold.  Season  your  admi- 
ration for  a  while  with — 


146        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

The  Man  [holding  up  his  hand  to  stop  her]  "  Season  your 
admiration  for  a  while — " 

The  Lady.    Fellow:   do  you  dare  mimic  me  to  my  face? 

The  Man.  Tis  music.  Can  you  not  hear?  When  a 
good  musician  sings  a  song,  do  you  not  sing  it  and  sing  it 
again  till  you  have  caught  and  fixed  its  perfect  melody? 
"Season  your  admiration  for  a  while":  God!  the  history 
of  man's  heart  is  in  that  one  word  admiration.  Admira- 
tion !  [ Taking  up  his  tablets]  What  was  it?  "Suspend  your 
admiration  for  a  space — " 

The  Lady.  A  very  vile  jingle  of  esses.  I  said  "Season 
your — 

The  Man  [hastily]  Season:  ay,  season,  season,  season. 
Plague  on  my  memory,  my  wretched  memory!  I  must  een 
write  it  down.  [He  begins  to  write,  but  stops,  his  memory 
failing  him].  Yet  tell  me  which  was  the  vile  jingle?  You 
said  very  justly:  mine  own  ear  caught  it  even  as  my  false 
tongue  said  it. 

The  Lady.  You  said  "for  a  space."  I  said  "for  a 
while." 

The  Man.  "For  a  while"  [he  corrects  it].  Good!  [Ar- 
dently] And  now  be  mine  neither  for  a  space  nor  a  while, 
but  for  ever. 

The  Lady.  Odds  my  life!  Are  you  by  chance  making 
love  to  me,  knave? 

The  Man.  Nay:  tis  you  who  have  made  the  love:  I  but 
pour  it  out  at  your  feet.  I  cannot  but  love  a  lass  that  sets 
such  store  by  an  apt  word.  Therefore  vouchsafe,  divine 
perfection  of  a  woman — no:  I  have  said  that  before  some- 
where; and  the  wordy  garment  of  my  love  for  you  must  be 
fire-new — 

The  Lady.  You  talk  too  much,  sir.  Let  me  warn  you: 
I  am  more  accustomed  to  be  listened  to  than  preached  at. 

The  Man.  The  most  are  like  that  that  do  talk  well. 
But  though  you  spake  with  the  tongues  of  angels,  as  in- 
deed you  do,  yet  know  that  I  am  the  king  of  words — 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        147 

The  Lady.    A  king,  ha! 

The  Man.  No  less.  We  are  poor  things,  we  men  and 
women — 

The  Lady.    Dare  you  call  me  woman? 

The  Man.  What  nobler  name  can  I  tender  you?  How 
else  can  I  love  you?  Yet  you  may  well  shrink  from  the 
name:  have  I  not  said  we  are  but  poor  things?  Yet  there 
is  a  power  that  can  redeem  us. 

The  Lady.  Gramercy  for  your  sermon,  sir.  I  hope  I 
know  my  duty. 

The  Man.  This  is  no  sermon,  but  the  living  truth. 
The  power  I  speak  of  is  the  power  of  immortal  poesy.  For 
know  that  vile  as  this  world  is,  and  worms  as  we  are,  you 
have  but  to  invest  all  this  vileness  with  a  magical  garment 
of  words  to  transfigure  us  and  uplift  our  souls  til  earth 
flowers  into  a  million  heavens. 

The  Lady.  You  spoil  your  heaven  with  your  million. 
You  are  extravagant.  Observe  some  measure  in  your 
speech.  i 

The  Man.    You  speak  now  as  Ben  does. 

The  Lady.    And  who,  pray,  is  Ben? 

The  Man.  A  learned  bricklayer  who  thinks  that  the 
sky  is  at  the  top  of  his  ladder,  and  so  takes  it  on  him  to  re- 
buke me  for  flying.  I  tell  you  there  is  no  word  yet  coined 
and  no  melody  yet  sung  that  is  extravagant  and  majestical 
enough  for  the  glory  that  lovely  words  can  reveal.  It  is 
heresy  to  deny  it:  have  you  not  been  taught  that  in  the 
beginning  was  the  Word?  that  the  Word  was  with  God? 
nay,  that  the  Word  was  God? 

The  Lady.  Beware,  fellow,  how  you  presume  to  speak 
of  holy  things.     The  Queen  is  the  head  of  the  Church. 

The  Man.  You  are  the  head  of  my  Church  when  yom 
speak  as  you  did  at  first.  "All  the  perfumes  of  Arabia"!! 
Can  the  Queen  speak  thus?  They  say  she  playeth  well 
upon  the  virginals.  Let  her  play  so  to  me;  and  I'll  kissi 
her  hands.  But  until  then,  you  are  my  Queen;  and  I'll  kiss 


148        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

those  lips  that  have  dropt  music  on  my  heart.  [He  puts  his 
arms  about  her]. 

The  Lady.  Unmeasured  impudence!  On  your  life,  take 
your  hands  from  me. 

The  Dark  Lady  comes  stooping  along  the  terrace  behind 
them,  like  a  running  thrush.  When  she  sees  how  they  are 
employed,  she  rises  angrily  to  her  full  height,  and  listens 
jealously. 

The  Man  [unaware  of  the  Dark  Lady]  Then  cease  to 
make  my  hands  tremble  with  the  streams  of  life  you  pour 
through  them.  You  hold  me  as  the  lodestar  holds  the  iron: 
I  cannot  but  cling  to  you.  We  are  lost,  you  and  I:  noth- 
ing can  separate  us  now. 

The  Dark  Lady.  We  shall  see  that,  false  lying  hound, 
you  and  your  filthy  trull.  [With  two  vigorous  cuffs,  she 
knocks  the  pair  asunder,  sending  the  man,  who  is  unlucky 
enough  to  receive  a  righthanded  blow,  sprawling  on  the  flags]. 
Take  that,  both  of  you! 

The  Cloaked  Lady  [in  towering  wrath,  throwing  off  her 
cloak  and  turning  in  outraged  majesty  on  her  assailant]  High 
treason ! 

The  Dark  Lady  [recognizing  her  and  falling  on  her 
knees  in  abject  terror]  Will:  I  am  lost:  I  have  struck  the 
Queen. 

The  Man  [sitting  up  as  majestically  as  his  ignominious 
posture  allows]  Woman:  you  have  struck  WILLIAM 
SHAKESPEAR. 

Queen  Elizabeth  [stupent]  Marry,  come  up!!!  Struck 
William  Shakespear  quotha!  And  who  in  the  name  of  all 
the  sluts  and  jades  and  light-o'-loves  and  fly-by-nights  that 
infest  this  palace  of  mine,  may  William  Shakespear  be? 

The  Dark  Lady.  Madam:  he  is  but  a  player.  Oh,  I 
could  have  my  hand  cut  off — 

Queen  Elizabeth.  Belike  you  will,  mistress.  Have 
you  bethought  you  that  I  am  like  to  have  your  head  cut  off 
as  well? 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        149 

The  Dark  Lady.    Will:   save  me.     Oh,  save  me. 

Elizabeth.  Save  you!  A  likely  savior,  on  my  royal 
word!  I  had  thought  this  fellow  at  least  an  esquire;  fori 
had  hoped  that  even  the  vilest  of  my  ladies  would  not  have 
dishonored  my  Court  by  wantoning  with  a  baseborn 
servant. 

Shakespear  [indignantly  scrambling  to  his  feet]  Base- 
born!  I,  a  Shakespear  of  Stratford!  I,  whose  mother  was 
an  Arden!    baseborn!     You  forget  yourself,  madam. 

Elizabeth  [furious]  S'blood!  do  I  so?  I  will  teach 
you— 

The  Dark  Lady  [rising  from  her  knees  and  throwing  her- 
self between  them]  Will:  in  God's  name  anger  her  no  fur- 
ther.    It  is  death.     Madam:    do  not  listen  to  him. 

SHAKrsPEAR.  Not  were  it  een  to  save  your  life,  Mary, 
not  to  mention  mine  own,  will  I  flatter  a  monarch  who  for- 
gets what  is  due  to  my  family.  I  deny  not  that  my  father 
was  brought  down  to  be  a  poor  bankrupt;  but  twas  his 
gentle  blood  that  was  ever  too  generous  for  trade.  Never 
did  he  disown  his  debts.  Tis  true  he  paid  them  not;  but 
it  is  an  attested  truth  that  he  gave  bills  for  them;  and 
twas  those  bills,  in  the  hands  of  base  hucksters,  that  were 
his  undoing. 

Elizabeth  [grimly]  The  son  of  your  father  shall  learn 
his  place  in  the  presence  of  the  daughter  of  Harry  the 
Eighth. 

Shakespear  [swelling  with  intolerant  importance]  Name 
not  that  inordinate  man  in  the  same  breath  with  Strat- 
ford's worthiest  alderman.  John  Shakespear  wedded  but 
once:  Harry  Tudor  was  married  six  times.  You  should 
blush  to  utter  his  name. 

The  Dark  Lady  1  f  Will :  for  pity's 

\    crying  out  together     j       sake — 

Elizabeth  J  (  Insolent  dog — 

Shakespear  [cutting  them  short]  How  know  you  that 
King  Harry  was  indeed  your  father? 


150        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

Elizabeth  1  Zounds!     Now  by —  [she  stops  to 

grind  her  teeth  with  rage]. 

The  Dark  Lady    [  She  will  have  me  whipped  through 

the  streets.     Oh  God!    Oh  God! 

Shakespear.  Learn  to  know  yourself  better,  madam. 
I  am  an  honest  gentleman  of  unquestioned  parentage,  and 
have  already  sent  in  my  demand  for  the  coat-of-arms  that 
is  lawfully  mine.     Can  you  say  as  much  for  yourself? 

Elizabeth  [almost  beside  herself]  Another  word;  and  I 
begin  with  mine  own  hands  the  work  the  hangman  shall 
finish. 

Shakespear.  You  are  no  true  Tudor:  this  baggage  here 
has  as  good  a  right  to  your  royal  seat  as  you.  What  main- 
tains you  on  the  throne  of  England?  Is  it  your  renowned 
wit?  your  wisdom  that  sets  at  naught  the  craftiest  states- 
men of  the  Christian  world?  No.  Tis  the  mere  chance 
that  might  have  happened  to  any  milkmaid,  the  caprice  of 
Nature  that  made  you  the  most  wondrous  piece  of  beauty 
the  age  hath  seen.  [Elizabeth's  raised  fists,  on  the  point  of 
striking  him,  fall  to  her  side].  That  is  what  hath  brought 
all  men  to  your  feet,  and  founded  your  throne  on  the  im- 
pregnable rock  of  your  proud  heart,  a  stony  island  in  a 
sea  of  desire.  There,  madam,  is  some  wholesome  blunt 
honest  speaking  for  you.     Now  do  your  worst. 

Elizabeth  [with  dignity]  Master  Shakespear:  it  is  well 
for  you  that  I  am  a  merciful  prince.  I  make  allowance  for 
your  rustic  ignorance.  But  remember  that  there  are 
things  which  be  true,  and  are  yet  not  seemly  to  be  said  (I 
will  not  say  to  a  queen;  for  you  will  have  it  that  I  am 
none)  but  to  a  virgin. 

Shakespear  [bluntly]  It  is  no  fault  of  mine  that  you  are 
a  virgin,  madam,  albeit  tis  my  misfortune. 

The  Dark  Lady  [terrified  again]  In  mercy,  madam,  hold 
no  further  discourse  with  him.  He  hath  ever  some  lewd 
jest  on  his  tongue.  You  hear  how  he  useth  me!  calling  me 
baggage  and  the  like  to  your  Majesty's  face. 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        151 

Elizabeth.  As  for  you,  mistress,  I  have  yet  to  demand 
what  your  business  is  at  this  hour  in  this  place,  and  how 
you  come  to  be  so  concerned  with  a  player  that  you  strike 
blindly  at  your  sovereign  in  your  jealousy  of  him. 

The  Dabk  Lady.  Madam:  as  I  live  and  hope  for  sal- 
vation— 

Shakespear  [sardonically]    Ha! 

The  Dark  Lady  [angrily]  — ay,  I'm  as  like  to  be  saved 
as  thou  that  believest  naught  save  some  black  magic  of 
words  and  verses — I  say,  madam,  as  I  am  a  living  woman 
I  came  here  to  break  with  him  for  ever.  Oh,  madam,  if  you 
would  know  what  misery  is,  listen  to  this  man  that  is  more 
than  man  and  less  at  the  same  time.  He  will  tie  you  down 
to  anatomize  your  very  soul:  he  will  wring  tears  of  blood 
from  your  humiliation;  and  then  he  will  heal  the  wound 
with  flatteries  that  no  woman  can  resist. 

Shakespear.  Flatteries!  [Kneeling]  Oh,  madam,  I  put 
my  case  at  your  royal  feet.  I  confess  to  much.  I  have  a 
rude  tongue:  I  am  unmannerly:  I  blaspheme  against  the 
holiness  of  anointed  royalty;  but  oh,  my  royal  mistress, 
AM  I  a  flatterer? 

Elizabeth.  I  absolve  you  as  to  that.  You  are  far  too 
plain  a  dealer  to  please  me.     [He  rises  gratefully]. 

The  Dark  Lady.  Madam:  he  is  flattering  you  even  as 
he  speaks. 

Elizabeth  [a  terrible  flash  in  her  eye]    Ha!    Is  it  so? 

Shakespear.  Madam:  she  is  jealous;  and,  heaven 
help  me!  not  without  reason.  Oh,  you  say  you  are  a  mer- 
ciful prince;  but  that  was  cruel  of  you,  that  hiding  of  your 
royal  dignity  when  you  found  me  here.  For  how  can  I  ever 
be  content  with  this  black-haired,  black-eyed,  black-avised 
devil  again  now  that  I  have  looked  upon  real  beauty  and 
real  majesty? 

The  Dark  Lady  [wounded  and  desperate]  He  hath  swore 
to  me  ten  times  over  that  the  day  shall  come  in  England 
when  black  women,  for  all  their  foulness,  shall  be  more 


152       The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

thought  on  than  fair  ones.  [To  Shakespear,  scolding  at  him] 
Deny  it  if  thou  canst.  Oh,  he  is  compact  of  lies  and  scorns. 
I  am  tired  of  being  tossed  up  to  heaven  and  dragged  down 
to  hell  at  every  whim  that  takes  him.  I  am  ashamed  to  my 
very  soul  that  I  have  abased  myself  to  love  one  that  my 
father  would  not  have  deemed  fit  to  hold  my  stirrup — 
one  that  will  talk  to  all  the  world  about  me — that  will 
put  my  love  and  my  shame  into  his  plays  and  make  me 
blush  for  myself  there — that  will  write  sonnets  about  me 
that  no  man  of  gentle  strain  would  put  his  hand  to.  I  am 
all  disordered:  I  know  not  what  I  am  saying  to  your 
Majesty:    I  am  of  all  ladies  most  deject  and  wretched — 

Shakespear.  Ha!  At  last  sorrow  hath  struck  a  note 
of  music  out  of  thee.  "Of  all  ladies  most  deject  and 
wretched."     [He  makes  a  note  of  it]. 

The  Dark  Lady.  Madam:  I  implore  you  give  me 
leave  to  go.     I  am  distracted  with  grief  and  shame.     I — 

Elizabeth.  Go  [The  Dark  Lady  tries  to  kiss  her  hand]. 
No  more.  Go.  [The  Dark  Lady  goes,  convulsed].  You 
have  been  cruel  to  that  poor  fond  wretch,  Master  Shake- 
spear. 

Shakespear.  I  am  not  cruel,  madam;  but  you  know 
the  fable  of  Jupiter  and  Semele.  I  could  not  help  my 
lightnings  scorching  her. 

Elizabeth.  You  have  an  overweening  conceit  of  your- 
self, sir,  that  displeases  your  Queen. 

Shakespear.  Oh,  madam,  can  I  go  about  with  the 
modest  cough  of  a  minor  poet,  belittling  my  inspiration 
and  making  the  mightiest  wonder  of  your  reign  a  thing  of 
nought?  I  have  said  that  "not  marble  nor  the  gilded 
monuments  of  princes  shall  outlive"  the  words  with 
which  I  make  the  world  glorious  or  foolish  at  my  will. 
Besides,  I  would  have  you  think  me  great  enough  to 
grant  me  a  boon. 

Elizabeth.  I  hope  it  is  a  boon  that  may  be  asked  of 
a  virgin  Queen  without  offence,  sir.     I  mistrust  your  for- 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        153 

wardness;  and  I  bid  you  remember  that  I  do  not  suffer 
persons  of  your  degree  (if  I  may  say  so  without  offence 
to  your  father  the  alderman)  to  presume  too  far. 

Shakespear.  Oh,  madam,  I  shall  not  forget  myself 
again;  though  by  my  life,  could  I  make  you  a  serving 
wench,  neither  a  queen  nor  a  virgin  should  you  be  for  so 
much  longer  as  a  flash  of  lightning  might  take  to  cross  the 
river  to  the  Bankside.  But  since  you  are  a  queen  and  will 
none  of  me,  nor  of  Philip  of  Spain,  nor  of  any  other  mortal 
man,  I  must  een  contain  myself  as  best  I  may,  and  ask  you 
only  for  a  boon  of  State. 

Elizabeth.  A  boon  of  State  already!  You  are  becom- 
ing a  courtier  like  the  rest  of  them.  You  lack  advance- 
ment. 

Shakespear.  "Lack  advancement."  By  your  Ma- 
jesty's leave:  a  queenly  phrase.  [He  is  about  to  write  it 
down]. 

Elizabeth  [striking  the  tablets  from  his  hand]  Your 
tables  begin  to  anger  me,  sir.  I  am  not  here  to  write  your 
plays  for  you. 

Shakespear.  You  are  here  to  inspire  them,  madam. 
For  this,  among  the  rest,  were  you  ordained.  But  the  boon 
I  crave  is  that  you  do  endow  a  great  playhouse,  or,  if  I 
may  make  bold  to  coin  a  scholarly  name  for  it,  a  National 
Theatre,  for  the  better  instruction  and  gracing  of  your 
Majesty's  subjects. 

Elizabeth.  Why,  sir,  are  there  not  theatres  enow  on 
the  Bankside  and  in  Blackfriars? 

Shakespear.  Madam:  these  are  the  adventures  of 
needy  and  desperate  men  that  must,  to  save  themselves 
from  perishing  of  want,  give  the  sillier  sort  of  people  what 
they  best  like;  and  what  they  best  like,  God  knows,  is  not 
their  own  betterment  and  instruction,  as  we  well  see  by 
the  example  of  the  churches,  which  must  needs  compel 
men  to  frequent  them,  though  they  be  open  to  all  without 
charge.     Only  when  there  is  a  matter  of  a  murder,  or  a 


154        The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

plot,  or  a  pretty  youth  in  petticoats,  or  some  naughty  tale 
of  wantonness,  will  your  subjects  pay  the  great  cost  of 
good  players  and  their  finery,  with  a  little  profit  to  boot. 
To  prove  this  I  will  tell  you  that  I  have  written  two  noble 
and  excellent  plays  setting  forth  the  advancement  of 
women  of  high  nature  and  fruitful  industry  even  as  your 
Majesty  is:  the  one  a  skilful  physician,  the  other  a  sister 
devoted  to  good  works.  I  have  also  stole  from  a  book  of 
idle  wanton  tales  two  of  the  most  damnable  foolishnesses 
in  the  world,  in  the  one  of  which  a  woman  goeth  in  man's 
attire  and  maketh  impudent  love  to  her  swain,  who  pleas- 
eth  the  groundlings  by  overthrowing  a  wrestler;  whilst, 
in  the  other,  one  of  the  same  kidney  sheweth  her  wit  by 
saying  endless  naughtinesses  to  a  gentleman  as  lewd  as 
herself.  I  have  writ  these  to  save  my  friends  from  penury, 
yet  shewing  my  scorn  for  such  follies  and  for  them  that 
praise  them  by  calling  the  one  As  You  Like  It,  meaning 
that  it  is  not  as  /  like  it,  and  the  other  Much  Ado  About 
Nothing,  as  it  truly  is.  And  now  these  two  filthy  pieces 
drive  their  nobler  fellows  from  the  stage,  where  indeed  I 
cannot  have  my  lady  physician  presented  at  all,  she  being 
too  honest  a  woman  for  the  taste  of  the  town.  Wherefore 
I  humbly  beg  your  Majesty  to  give  order  that  a  theatre 
be  endowed  out  of  the  public  revenue  for  the  playing  of 
those  pieces  of  mine  which  no  merchant  will  touch,  seeing 
that  his  gain  is  so  much  greater  with  the  worse  than  with 
the  better.  Thereby  you  shall  also  encourage  other  men 
to  undertake  the  writing  of  plays  who  do  now  despise  it 
and  leave  it  wholly  to  those  whose  counsels  will  work  little 
good  to  your  realm.  For  this  writing  of  plays  is  a  great 
matter,  forming  as  it  does  the  minds  and  affections  of  men 
in  such  sort  that  whatsoever  they  see  done  in  show  on  the 
stage,  they  will  presently  be  doing  in  earnest  in  the  world, 
which  is  but  a  larger  stage.  Of  late,  as  you  know,  the 
Church  taught  the  people  by  means  of  plays;  but  the 
people  flocked  only  to  such  as  were  full  of  superstitious 


The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets        155 

miracles  and  bloody  martyrdoms;  and  so  the  Church, 
which  also  was  just  then  brought  into  straits  by  the 
policy  of  your  royal  father,  did  abandon  and  discounte- 
nance the  art  of  playing;  and  thus  it  fell  into  the  hands  of 
poor  players  and  greedy  merchants  that  had  their  pockets 
to  look  to  and  not  the  greatness  of  this  your  kingdom. 
Therefore  now  must  your  Majesty  take  up  that  good  work 
that  your  Church  hath  abandoned,  and  restore  the  art  of 
playing  to  its  former  use  and  dignity. 

Elizabeth.  Master  Shakespear:  I  will  speak  of  this 
matter  to  the  Lord  Treasurer. 

Shakespear.  Then  am  I  undone,  madam;  for  there 
was  never  yet  a  Lord  Treasurer  that  could  find  a  penny  for 
anything  over  and  above  the  necessary  expenses  of  your 
government,  save  for  a  war  or  a  salary  for  his  own  nephew. 

Elizabeth.  Master  Shakespear:  you  speak  sooth;  yet 
cannot  I  in  any  wise  mend  it.  I  dare  not  offend  my  un- 
ruly Puritans  by  making  so  lewd  a  place  as  the  playhouse 
a  public  charge;  and  there  be  a  thousand  things  to  be 
done  in  this  London  of  mine  before  your  poetry  can  have 
its  penny  from  the  general  purse.  I  tell  thee,  Master  Will, 
it  will  be  three  hundred  years  and  more  before  my  sub- 
jects learn  that  man  cannot  live  by  bread  alone,  but  by 
every  word  that  cometh  from  the  mouth  of  those  whom 
God  inspires.  By  that  time  you  and  I  will  be  dust  beneath 
the  feet  of  the  horses,  if  indeed  there  be  any  horses  then, 
and  men  be  still  riding  instead  of  flying.  Now  it  may  be 
that  by  then  your  works  will  be  dust  also. 

Shakespear.  They  will  stand,  madam :  fear  nor  for  that. 

Elizabeth.  It  may  prove  so.  But  of  this  I  am  certain 
(for  I  know  my  countrymen)  that  until  every  other  coun- 
try in  the  Christian  world,  even  to  barbarian  Muscovy 
and  the  hamlets  of  the  boorish  Germans,  have  its  play- 
house at  the  public  charge,  England  will  never  adventure. 
And  she  will  adventure  then  only  because  it  is  her  desire 
to  be  ever  in  the  fashion,  and  to  do  humbly  and  dutifully 


156       The  Dark  Lady  of  the  Sonnets 

whatso  she  seeth  everybody  else  doing.  In  the  meantime 
you  must  content  yourself  as  best  you  can  by  the  playing 
of  those  two  pieces  which  you  give  out  as  the  most  dam- 
nable ever  writ,  but  which  your  countrymen,  I  warn  you, 
will  swear  are  the  best  you  have  ever  done.  But  this  I 
will  say,  that  if  I  could  speak  across  the  ages  to  our  de- 
scendants, I  should  heartily  recommend  them  to  fulfil 
your  wish;  for  the  Scottish  minstrel  hath  well  said  that  he 
that  maketh  the  songs  of  a  nation  is  mightier  than  he  that 
maketh  its  laws;  and  the  same  may  well  be  true  of  plays 
and  interludes.  [The  clock  chimes  the  first  quarter.  The 
warder  returns  on  his  round].  And  now,  sir,  we  are  upon  the 
hour  when  it  better  beseems  a  virgin  queen  to  be  abed  than 
to  converse  alone  with  the  naughtiest  of  her  subjects.  Ho 
there!     Who  keeps  ward  on  the  queen's  lodgings  tonight? 

The  Wabdeb.    I  do,  an't  please  your  majesty. 

Elizabeth.  See  that  you  keep  it  better  in  future.  You 
have  let  pass  a  most  dangerous  gallant  even  to  the  very 
door  of  our  royal  chamber.  Lead  him  forth;  and  bring 
me  word  when  he  is  safely  locked  out;  for  I  shall  scarce 
dare  disrobe  until  the  palace  gates  are  between  us. 

Shakespeae  [kissing  her  hand]  My  body  goes  through 
the  gate  into  the  darkness,  madam;  but  my  thoughts  fol- 
low you. 

Elizabeth.    How!  to  my  bed! 

Shakespeae.  No,  madam,  to  your  prayers,  in  which  I 
beg  you  to  remember  my  theatre. 

Elizabeth.  That  is  my  prayer  to  posterity.  Forget 
not  your  own  to  God;  and  so  goodnight,  Master  Will. 

Shakespeae.  Goodnight,  great  Elizabeth.  God  save 
the  Queen! 

Elizabeth.    Amen. 

Exeunt  severally,  she  to  her  chamber:  he,  in  custody  of  the 
warder,  to  the  gate  nearest  Blackfriars. 

Atot,  St.  Lawrence, 
20th  June  1910. 


FANNY'S  FIRST  PLAY 
XXII 

1911 


157 


PREFACE  TO   FANNY'S    FIRST   PLAY 

Fanny's  First  Play,  being  but  a  potboiler,  needs  no  pref- 
ace. But  its  lesson  is  not,  I  am  sorry  to  say,  unneeded. 
Mere  morality,  or  the  substitution  of  custom  for  conscience, 
was  once  accounted  a  shameful  and  cynical  thing:  people 
talked  of  right  and  wrong,  of  honor  and  dishonor,  of  sin 
and  grace,  of  salvation  and  damnation,  not  of  morality 
and  immorality.  The  word  morality,  if  we  met  it  in  the 
Bible,  would  surprise  us  as  much  as  the  word  telephone 
or  motor  car.  Nowadays  we  do  not  seem  to  know  that 
there  is  any  other  test  of  conduct  except  morality;  and  the 
result  is  that  the  young  had  better  have  their  souls  awak- 
ened by  disgrace,  capture  by  the  police,  and  a  month's 
hard  labor,  than  drift  along  from  their  cradles  to  their 
graves  doing  what  other  people  do  for  no  other  reason  than 
that  other  people  do  it,  and  knowing  nothing  of  good  and 
evil,  of  courage  and  cowardice,  or  indeed  anything  but 
how  to  keep  hunger  and  concupiscence  and  fashionable 
dressing  within  the  bounds  of  good  taste  except  when  their 
excesses  can  be  concealed.  Is  it  any  wonder  that  I  am 
driven  to  offer  to  young  people  in  our  suburbs  the  desper- 
ate advice:  Do  something  that  will  get  you  into  trouble? 
But  please  do  not  suppose  that  I  defend  a  state  of  things 
which  makes  such  advice  the  best  that  can  be  given  under 
the  circumstances,  or  that  I  do  not  know  how  difficult  it 

159 


160         Preface  to  Fanny's  First  Play 

is  to  find  out  a  way  of  getting  into  trouble  that  will  com- 
bine loss  of  respectability  with  integrity  of  self-respect 
and  reasonable  consideration  for  other  peoples'  feelings 
and  interests  on  every  point  except  their  dread  of  losing 
their  own  respectability.  But  when  there's  a  will  there's 
a  way.  I  hate  to  see  dead  people  walking  about:  it  is  un- 
natural. And  our  respectable  middle  class  people  are  all 
as  dead  as  mutton.  Out  of  the  mouth  of  Mrs  Knox  I  have 
delivered  on  them  the  judgment  of  her  God. 

The  critics  whom  I  have  lampooned  in  the  induction 
to  this  play  under  the  names  of  Trotter,  Vaughan,  and 
Gunn  will  forgive  me:  in  fact  Mr  Trotter  forgave  me  be- 
forehand, and  assisted  the  make-up  by  which  Mr  Claude 
King  so  successfully  simulated  his  personal  appearance. 
The  critics  whom  I  did  not  introduce  were  somewhat 
hurt,  as  I  should  have  been  myself  under  the  same  circum- 
stances; but  I  had  not  room  for  them  all;  so  I  can  only 
apologize  and  assure  them  that  I  meant  no  disrespect. 

The  concealment  of  the  authorship,  if  a  secret  de  Polichi- 
nelle  can  be  said  to  involve  concealment,  was  a  necessary 
part  of  the  play.  In  so  far  as  it  was  effectual,  it  operated 
as  a  measure  of  relief  to  those  critics  and  playgoers  who 
are  so  obsessed  by  my  strained  legendary  reputation  that 
they  approach  my  plays  in  a  condition  which  is  really  one 
of  derangement,  and  are  quite  unable  to  conceive  a  play 
of  mine  as  anything  but  a  trap  baited  with  paradoxes,  and 
designed  to  compass  their  ethical  perversion  and  intellec- 
tual confusion.  If  it  were  possible,  I  should  put  forward 
all  my  plays  anonymously,  or  hire  some  less  disturbing 
person,  as  Bacon  is  said  to  have  hired  Shakespear,  to  father 
my  plays  for  me. 

B@"  Fanny's  First  Play  was  performed  for  the  first  time 
at  the  Little  Theatre  in  the  Adelphi,  London,  on  the  afternoon 
of  Wednesday,  April  19th   1911. 


FANNY'S  FIRST  PLAY 


INDUCTION 

The  end  of  a  saloon  in  an  old-fashioned  country  house 
(Florence  Towers,  the  property  of  Count  O'Dowda)  has  been 
curtained  off  to  form  a  stage  for  a  private  theatrical  perform- 
ance. A  footman  in  grandiose  Spanish  livery  enters  before 
the  curtain,  on  its  O.P.  side. 

Footman  [announcing]  Mr  Cecil  Savoyard.  [Cecil  Savo- 
yard comes  in:  a  middle-aged  man  in  evening  dress  and  a  fur- 
lined  overcoat.  He  is  surprised  to  find  nobody  to  receive  him. 
So  is  the  Footman}.  Oh,  beg  pardon,  sir:  I  thought  the 
Count  was  here.  He  was  when  I  took  up  your  name.  He 
must  have  gone  through  the  stage  into  the  library.  This 
way,  sir.  [He  moves  towards  the  division  in  the  middle  of  the 
curtains}. 

Savoyard.  Half  a  mo.  [The  Footman  stops].  When 
does  the  play  begin?     Half-past  eight? 

Footman.    Nine,  sir. 

Savoyard.  Oh,  good,  Well,  will  you  telephone  to  my 
wife  at  the  George  that  it's  not  until  nine? 

Footman.    Right,  sir.     Mrs  Cecil  Savoyard,  sir? 

Savoyard.    No:  Mrs  William  Tinkler.     Dont  forget. 

The  Footman.  Mrs  Tinkler,  sir.  Right,  sir.  [The 
Count  comes  in  through  the  curtains].  Here  is  the  Count,  sir. 
[Announcing]  Mr  Cecil  Savoyard,  sir.     [He  withdraws]. 

161 


162  Fanny's  First  Play 

Count  O'Dowda  [A  handsome  man  of  fifty,  dressed  with 
studied  elegance  a  hundred  years  out  of  date,  advancing  cor- 
dially to  shake  hands  with  his  visitor]  Pray  excuse  me,  Mr 
Savoyard.  I  suddenly  recollected  that  all  the  bookcases 
in  the  library  were  locked — in  fact  theyve  never  been 
opened  since  we  came  from  Venice — and  as  our  literary 
guests  will  probably  use  the  library  a  good  deal,  I  just 
ran  in  to  unlock  everything. 

Savoyard.  Oh,  you  mean  the  dramatic  critics.  M'yes. 
I  suppose  theres  a  smoking  room? 

The  Count.  My  study  is  available.  An  old-fashioned 
house,  you  understand.    Wont  you  sit  down,  Mr  Savoyard? 

Savoyard.  Thanks.  [They  sit.  Savoyard,  looking  at  his 
host's  obsolete  costume,  continues]  I  had  no  idea  you  were 
going  to  appear  in  the  piece  yourself. 

The  Count.  I  am  not.  I  wear  this  costume  because — 
well,  perhaps  I  had  better  explain  the  position,  if  it 
interests  you. 

Savoyard.    Certainly. 

The  Count.  Well,  you  see,  Mr  Savoyard,  I'm  rather  a 
stranger  in  your  world.  I  am  not,  I  hope,  a  modern  man 
in  any  sense  of  the  word.  I'm  not  really  an  Englishman: 
my  family  is  Irish:  Ive  lived  all  my  life  in  Italy — in 
Venice  mostly — my  very  title  is  a  foreign  one:  I  am  a 
Count  of  the  Holy  Roman  Empire. 

Savoyard.    Where's  that? 

The  Count.  At  present,  nowhere,  except  as  a  memory 
and  an  ideal.  [Savoyard  inclines  his  head  respectfully  to  the 
ideal].  But  I  am  by  no  means  an  idealogue.  I  am  not 
content  with  beautiful  dreams:  I  want  beautiful  realities. 

Savoyard.  Hear,  hear!  I'm  all  with  you  there — when 
you  can  get  them. 

The  Count.  Why  not  get  them?  The  difficulty  is  not 
that  there  are  no  beautiful  realities,  Mr  Savoyard:  the 
difficulty  is  that  so  few  of  us  know  them  when  we  see 
them.    We  have  inherited  from  the  past  a  vast  treasure  of 


Fanny's  First  Play  163 

beauty — of  imperishable  masterpieces  of  poetry,  of  paint- 
ing, of  sculpture,  of  architecture,  of  music,  of  exquisite 
fashions  in  dress,  in  furniture,  in  domestic  decoration. 
We  can  contemplate  these  treasures.  We  can  reproduce 
many  of  them.  We  can  buy  a  few  inimitable  originals. 
We  can  shut  out  the  nineteenth  century — 

Savoyard  [correcting  him]    The  twentieth. 

The  Count.  To  me  the  century  I  shut  out  will  always 
be  the  nineteenth  century,  just  as  your  national  anthem 
will  always  be  God  Save  the  Queen,  no  matter  how  many 
kings  may  succeed.  I  found  England  befouled  with  in- 
dustrialism: well,  I  did  what  Byron  did:  I  simply  refused 
to  live  in  it.  You  remember  Byron's  words:  "I  am  sure 
my  bones  would  not  rest  in  an  English  grave,  or  my  clay 
mix  with  the  earth  of  that  country.  I  believe  the  thought 
would  drive  me  mad  on  my  deathbed  could  I  suppose  that 
any  of  my  friends  would  be  base  enough  to  convey  my 
carcase  back  to  her  soil.  I  would  not  even  feed  her  worms 
if  I  could  help  it." 

Savoyard.    Did  Byron  say  that? 

The  Count.    He  did,  sir. 

Savoyard.  It  dont  sound  like  him.  I  saw  a  good  deal 
of  him  at  one  time. 

The  Count.  You.'  But  how  is  that  possible?  You  are 
too  young. 

Savoyard.  I  was  quite  a  lad,  of  course.  But  I  had  a 
job  in  the  original  production  of  Our  Boys. 

The  Count.  My  dear  sir,  not  that  Byron.  Lord 
Byron,  the  poet. 

Savoyard.  Oh,  I  beg  your  pardon.  I  thought  you 
were  talking  of  the  Byron.     So  you  prefer  living  abroad? 

The  Count.  I  find  England  ugly  and  Philistine.  Well, 
I  dont  live  in  it.  I  find  modern  houses  ugly.  I  dont  live 
in  them:  I  have  a  palace  on  the  grand  canal.  I  find 
modern  clothes  prosaic.  I  dont  wear  them,  except,  of 
course,  in  the  street.     My  ears  are  offended  by  the  Cock- 


164  Fanny's  First  Play 

ney  twang:  I  keep  out  of  hearing  of  it  and  speak  and 
listen  to  Italian.  I  find  Beethoven's  music  coarse  and 
restless,  and  Wagner's  senseless  and  detestable.  I  do  not 
listen  to  them.  I  listen  to  Cimarosa,  to  Pergolesi,  to 
Gluck  and  Mozart.     Nothing  simpler,  sir. 

Savoyard.    It's  all  right  when  you  can  afford  it. 

The  Count.  Afford  it!  My  dear  Mr  Savoyard,  if  you 
are  a  man  with  a  sense  of  beauty  you  can  make  an  earthly 
paradise  for  yourself  in  Venice  on  £1500  a  year,  whilst  our 
wretched  vulgar  industrial  millionaires  are  spending 
twenty  thousand  on  the  amusements  of  billiard  markers. 
I  assure  you  I  am  a  poor  man  according  to  modern  ideas. 
But  I  have  never  had  anything  less  than  the  very  best 
that  life  has  produced.  It  is  my  good  fortune  to  have  a 
beautiful  and  lovable  daughter;  and  that  girl,  sir,  has 
never  seen  an  ugly  sight  or  heard  an  ugly  sound  that  I 
could  spare  her;  and  she  has  certainly  never  worn  an  ugly 
dress  or  tasted  coarse  food  or  bad  wine  in  her  life.  She 
has  lived  in  a  palace;  and  her  perambulator  was  a  gondola. 
Now  you  know  the  sort  of  people  we  are,  Mr  Savoyard. 
You  can  imagine  how  we  feel  here. 

Savoyard.    Rather  out  of  it,  eh? 

The  Count.    Out  of  it,  sir!     Out  of  what? 

Savoyard.    Well,  out  of  everything. 

The  Count.  Out  of  soot  and  fog  and  mud  and  east 
wind;  out  of  vulgarity  and  ugliness,  hypocrisy  and  greed, 
superstition  and  stupidity.  Out  of  all  this,  and  in  the 
sunshine,  in  the  enchanted  region  of  which  great  artists 
alone  have  had  the  secret,  in  the  sacred  footsteps  of  Byron, 
of  Shelley,  of  the  Brownings,  of  Turner  and  Buskin.  Dont 
you  envy  me,  Mr  Savoyard? 

Savoyard.  Some  of  us  must  live  in  England,  you  know, 
just  to  keep  the  place  going.  Besides — though,  mind  you, 
I  dont  say  it  isnt  all  right  from  the  high  art  point  of  view 
and  all  that — three  weeks  of  it  would  drive  me  melancholy 
mad.     However,  I'm  glad  you  told  me,  because  it  explains 


Fanny's  First  Play  165 

why  it  is  you  dont  seem  to  know  your  way  about  much  in 
England.  I  hope,  by  the  way,  that  everything  has  given 
satisfaction  to  your  daughter. 

The  Count.  She  seems  quite  satisfied.  She  tells  me 
that  the  actors  you  sent  down  are  perfectly  suited  to  their 
parts,  and  very  nice  people  to  work  with.  I  understand 
she  had  some  difficulties  at  the  first  rehearsals  with  the 
gentleman  you  call  the  producer,  because  he  hadnt  read 
the  play;  but  the  moment  he  found  out  what  it  was  all 
about  everything  went  smoothly. 

Savoyard.    Havnt  you  seen  the  rehearsals? 

The  Count.  Oh  no.  I  havnt  been  allowed  even  to  meet 
any  of  the  company.  All  I  can  tell  you  is  that  the  hero  is 
a  Frenchman  [Savoyard  is  rather  scandalized]:  I  asked  her 
not  to  have  an  English  hero.  That  is  all  I  know.  [Rue- 
fully] I  havnt  been  consulted  even  about  the  costumes, 
though  there,  I  think,  I  could  have  been  some  use. 

Savoyard  [puzzled]    But  there  arnt  any  costumes. 

The  Count  [seriously  shocked]  What!  No  costumes! 
Do  you  mean  to  say  it  is  a  modern  play? 

Savoyard.  I  dont  know:  I  didnt  read  it.  I  handed  it 
to  Billy  Burjoyce — the  producer,  you  know — and  left  it  to 
him  to  select  the  company  and  so  on.  But  I  should  have 
had  to  order  the  costumes  if  there  had  been  any.  There 
wernt. 

The  Count  [smiling  as  he  recovers  from  his  alarm]  I 
understand.  She  has  taken  the  costumes  into  her  own 
hands.  She  is  an  expert  in  beautiful  costumes.  I  venture 
to  promise  you,  Mr  Savoyard,  that  what  you  are  about  to 
see  will  be  like  a  Louis  Quatorze  ballet  painted  by  Watteau. 
The  heroine  will  be  an  exquisite  Columbine,  her  lover  a 
dainty  Harlequin,  her  father  a  picturesque  Pantaloon, 
and  the  valet  who  hoodwinks  the  father  and  brings  about 
the  happiness  of  the  lovers  a  grotesque  but  perfectly  taste- 
ful Punchinello  or  Mascarille  or  Sganarelle. 

Savoyard.    I   see.      That   makes   three    men;  and   the 


166  Fanny's  First  Play 

clown  and  policeman  will  make  five.  Thats  why  you 
wanted  five  men  in  the  company. 

The  Count.  My  dear  sir,  you  dont  suppose  I  mean  that 
vulgar,  ugly,  silly,  senseless,  malicious  and  destructive 
thing,  the  harlequinade  of  a  nineteenth  century  English 
Christmas  pantomime!  What  was  it  after  all  but  a  stupid 
attempt  to  imitate  the  success  made  by  the  genuis  of 
Grimaldi  a  hundred  years  ago?  My  daughter  does  not 
know  of  the  existence  of  such  a  thing.  I  refer  to  the  grace- 
ful and  charming  fantasies  of  the  Italian  and  French 
stages  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries. 

Savoyard.  Oh,  I  beg  pardon.  I  quite  agree  that  harle- 
quinades are  rot.  Theyve  been  dropped  at  all  smart 
theatres.  But  from  what  Billy  Burjoyce  told  me  I  got 
the  idea  that  your  daughter  knew  her  way  about  here, 
and  had  seen  a  lot  of  plays.  He  had  no  idea  she'd  been 
away  in  Venice  all  the  time. 

The  Count.  Oh,  she  has  not  been.  I  should  have 
explained  that  two  years  ago  my  daughter  left  me  to  com- 
plete her  education  at  Cambridge.  Cambridge  was  my 
own  University;  and  though  of  course  there  were  no 
women  there  in  my  time,  I  felt  confident  that  if  the  at- 
mosphere of  the  eighteenth  century  still  existed  any- 
where in  England,  it  would  be  at  Cambridge.  About 
three  months  ago  she  wrote  to  me  and  asked  whether  I 
wished  to  give  her  a  present  on  her  next  birthday.  Of 
course  I  said  yes;  and  she  then  astonished  and  delighted 
me  by  telling  me  that  she  had  written  a  play,  and  that  the 
present  she  wanted  was  a  private  performance  of  it  with 
real  actors  and  real  critics. 

Savoyard.  Yes:  thats  what  staggered  me.  It  was 
easy  enough  to  engage  a  company  for  a  private  perform- 
ance: it's  done  often  enough.  But  the  notion  of  having 
critics  was  new.  I  hardly  knew  how  to  set  about  it.  They 
dont  expect  private  engagements;  and  so  they  have  no 
agents.     Besides,  I  didnt  know  what  to  offer  them.     I 


Fanny's  First  Play  167 

knew  that  they  were  cheaper  than  actors,  because  they 
get  long  engagements:  forty  years  sometimes;  but  thats 
no  rule  for  a  single  job.  Then  theres  such  a  lot  of  them: 
on  first  nights  they  run  away  with  all  your  stalls:  you 
cant  find  a  decent  place  for  your  own  mother.  It  would 
have  cost  a  fortune  to  bring  the  lot. 

The  Count.  Of  course  I  never  dreamt  of  having  them 
all.     Only  a  few  first-rate  representative  men. 

Savoyard.  Just  so.  All  you  want  is  a  few  sample 
opinions.  Out  of  a  hundred  notices  you  wont  find  more 
than  four  at  the  outside  that  say  anything  different.  Well, 
Ive  got  just  the  right  four  for  you.  And  what  do  you 
think  it  has  cost  me? 

The  Count  [shrugging  his  shoulders]    I  cannot  guess. 

Savoyard.  Ten  guineas,  and  expenses.  I  had  to  give 
Flawner  Bannal  ten.  He  wouldnt  come  for  less;  and  he 
asked  fifty.  I  had  to  give  it,  because  if  we  hadnt  had  him 
we  might  just  as  well  have  had  nobody  at  all. 

The  Count.  But  what  about  the  others,  if  Mr  Flan- 
nel— 

Savoyard  [shocked]    Flawner  Bannal. 

The  Count. — if  Mr  Bannal  got  the  whole  ten? 

Savoyard.  Oh,  I  managed  that.  As  this  is  a  high-class 
sort  of  thing,  the  first  man  I  went  for  was  Trotter. 

The  Count.  Oh  indeed.  I  am  very  glad  you  have 
secured  Mr  Trotter.    I  have  read  his  Playful  Impressions. 

Savoyard.  Well,  I  was  rather  in  a  funk  about  him. 
Hes  not  exactly  what  I  call  approachable;  and  he  was  a 
bit  stand-off  at  first.  But  when  I  explained  and  told  him 
your  daughter — 

The  Count  [interrupting  in  alarm]  You  did  not  say 
that  the  play  was  by  her,  I  hope? 

Savoyard.  No:  thats  been  kept  a  dead  secret.  I  just 
said  your  daughter  has  asked  for  a  real  play  with  a  real 
author  and  a  real  critic  and  all  the  rest  of  it.  The  moment 
I  mentioned  the  daughter  I  had  him.     He  has  a  daughter 


168  Fanny's  First  Play 

of  his  own.  Wouldnt  hear  of  payment!  Offered  to  come 
just  to  please  her!     Quite  human.     I  was  surprised. 

The  Count.    Extremely  kind  of  him. 

Savoyard.  Then  I  went  to  Vaughan,  because  he  does 
music  as  well  as  the  drama:  and  you  said  you  thought 
there  would  be  music.  I  told  him  Trotter  would  feel 
lonely  without  him;  so  he  promised  like  a  bird.  Then  I 
thought  youd  like  one  of  the  latest  sort:  the  chaps  that 
go  for  the  newest  things  and  swear  theyre  oldfashioned. 
So  I  nailed  Gilbert  Gunn.  The  four  will  give  you  a  repre- 
sentative team.  By  the  way  [looking  at  his  watch]  theyll 
be  here  presently. 

The  Count.  Before  they  come,  Mr  Savoyard,  could 
you  give  me  any  hints  about  them  that  would  help  me  to 
make  a  little  conversation  with  them?  I  am,  as  you  said, 
rather  out  of  it  in  England;  and  I  might  unwittingly  say 
something  tactless. 

Savoyard.  Well,  let  me  see.  As  you  dont  like  English 
people,  I  dont  know  that  youll  get  on  with  Trotter,  be- 
cause hes  thoroughly  English:  never  happy  except  when 
hes  in  Paris,  and  speaks  French  so  unnecessarily  well  that 
everybody  there  spots  him  as  an  Englishman  the  moment 
he  opens  his  mouth.  Very  witty  and  all  that.  Pretends 
to  turn  up  his  nose  at  the  theatre  and  says  people  make 
too  much  fuss  about  art  [the  Count  is  extremely  indig- 
nant]. But  thats  only  his  modesty,  because  art  is  his  own 
line,  you  understand.  Mind  you  dont  chaff  him  about 
Aristotle. 

The  Count.    Why  should  I  chaff  him  about  Aristotle? 

Savoyard.  Well,  I  dont  know;  but  its  one  of  the  recog- 
nized ways  of  chaffing  him.  However,  youll  get  on  with 
him  all  right:  hes  a  man  of  the  world  and  a  man  of  sense. 
The  one  youll  have  to  be  careful  about  is  Vaughan. 

The  Count.    In  what  way,  may  I  ask? 

Savoyard.  Well,  Vaughan  has  no  sense  of  humor;  and 
if  you  joke  with  him  he'll  think  youre  insulting  him  on 


Fanny's  First  Play  169 

purpose.  Mind:  it's  not  that  he  doesnt  see  a  joke:  he 
does;  and  it  hurts  him.  A  comedy  scene  makes  him  sore 
all  over:  he  goes  away  black  and  blue,  and  pitches  into  the 
play  for  all  lies  worth. 

The  Count.  But  surely  that  is  a  very  serious  defect  in 
a  man  of  his  profession? 

Savoyard.  Yes  it  is,  and  no  mistake.  But  Vaughan  is 
honest,  and  dont  care  a  brass  farthing  what  he  says,  or 
whether  it  pleases  anybody  or  not;  and  you  must  have 
one  man  of  that  sort  to  say  the  things  that  nobody  else 
will  say. 

The  Count.  It  seems  to  me  to  carry  the  principle  of 
division  of  labor  too  far,  this  keeping  of  the  honesty  and 
the  other  qualities  in  separate  compartments.  What  is 
Mr  Gunn's  speciality,  if  I  may  ask? 

Savoyard.    Gunn  is  one  of  the  intellectuals. 

The  Count.    But  arnt  they  all  intellectuals? 

Savoyard.  Lord!  no:  heaven  forbid!  You  must  be 
careful  what  you  say  about  that:  I  shouldnt  like  anyone 
to  call  me  an  Intellectual:  I  dont  think  any  Englishman 
would!  They  dont  count  really,  you  know;  but  still  it's 
rather  the  thing  to  have  them.  Gunn  is  one  of  the  young 
intellectuals:  he  writes  plays  himself.  Hes  useful  because 
he  pitches  into  the  older  intellectuals  who  are  standing  in 
his  way.  But  you  may  take  it  from  me  that  none  of  these 
chaps  really  matter.  Flawner  Bannal's  your  man.  Bannal 
really  represents  the  British  playgoer.  When  he  likes  a 
thing,  you  may  take  your  oath  there  are  a  hundred  thou- 
sand people  in  London  thatll  like  it  if  they  can  only  be 
got  to  know  about  it.  Besides,  Bannal's  knowledge  of  the 
theatre  is  an  inside  knowledge.  We  know  him;  and  he 
knows  us.  He  knows  the  ropes:  he  knows  his  way  about: 
he  knows  what  hes  talking  about. 

The  Count  [with  a  little  sigh]  Age  and  experience,  I 
suppose? 

Savoyard.    Age!     I  should  put  him  at  twenty  at  the 


170  Fanny's  First  Play 

very  outside,  myself.  It's  not  an  old  man's  job  after  all, 
is  it?  Bannal  may  not  ride  the  literary  high  horse  like 
Trotter  and  the  rest;  but  I'd  take  his  opinion  before  any 
other  in  London.  Hes  the  man  in  the  street;  and  thats 
what  you  want. 

The  Count.  I  am  almost  sorry  you  didnt  give  the 
gentleman  his  full  terms.  I  should  not  have  grudged  the 
fifty  guineas  for  a  sound  opinion.  He  may  feel  shabbily 
treated. 

Savoyard.  Well,  let  him.  It  was  a  bit  of  side,  his  ask- 
ing fifty.  After  all,  what  is  he?  Only  a  pressman.  Jolly 
good  business  for  him  to  earn  ten  guineas:  hes  done  the 
same  job  often  enough  for  half  a  quid,  I  expect. 

Fanny  O'Dotvda  comes  precipitately  through  the  curtains, 
excited  and  nervous.  A  girl  of  nineteen  in  a  dress  synchron- 
ous with  her  father's. 

Fanny.  Papa,  papa,  the  critics  have  come.  And  one 
of  them  has  a  cocked  hat  and  sword  like  a — [she  notices 
Savoyard]  Oh,  I  beg  your  pardon. 

The  Count.  This  is  Mr  Savoyard,  your  impresario,  my 
dear. 

Fanny  [shaking  hands]    How  do  you  do? 

Savoyard.  Pleased  to  meet  you,  Miss  O'Dowda.  The 
cocked  hat  is  all  right.  Trotter  is  a  member  of  the  new 
Academic  Committee.  He  induced  them  to  go  in  for  a 
uniform  like  the  French  Academy;  and  I  asked  him  to 
wear  it. 

The  Footman  [announcing]  Mr  Trotter,  Mr  Vaughan, 
Mr  Gunn,  Mr  Flawner  Bannal.  [The  four  critics  enter. 
Trotter  wears  a  diplomatic  dress,  with  sword  and  three- 
cornered  hat.  His  age  is  about  50.  Vaughan  is  40.  Gunn 
is  30.  Flawner  Bannal  is  20  and  is  quite  unlike  the  others. 
They  can  be  classed  at  sight  as  professional  men:  Bannal  is 
obviously  one  of  those  unemployables  of  the  business  class  who 
manage  to  pick  up  a  living  by  a  sort  of  courage  which  gives 
him  cheerfulness,  conviviality,  and  bounce,  and  is  helped  out 


Fanny's  First  Play  171 

positively  by  a  slight  turn  for  writing,  and  negatively  by  a 
comfortable  ignorance  and  lack  of  intuition  which  hides  from 
him  all  the  dangers  and  disgraces  that  keep  men  of  finer  per- 
ception in  check.     The  Count  approaches  them  hospitably]. 

Savoyard.    Count  O'Dowda,  gentlemen.     Mr  Trotter. 

Trotter  [looki?ig  at  the  Count's  costume]  Have  I  the 
pleasure  of  meeting  a  confrere? 

The  Count.  No,  sir:  I  have  no  right  to  my  costume 
except  the  right  of  a  lover  of  the  arts  to  dress  myself 
handsomely.  You  are  most  welcome,  Mr  Trotter. 
[Trotter  bows  in  the  French  manner]. 

Savoyard.    Mr  Vaughan. 

The  Count.    How  do  you  do,  Mr  Vaughan? 

Vaughan.    Quite  well,  thanks. 

Savoyard.    Mr  Gunn. 

The  Count.  Delighted  to  make  your  acquaintance,  Mr 
Gunn. 

Gunn.    Very  pleased. 

Savoyard.    Mr  Flawner  Bannal. 

The  Count.    Very  kind  of  you  to  come,  Mr  Bannal. 

Bannal.    Dont  mention  it. 

The  Count.  Gentlemen,  my  daughter.  [They  all  bow]. 
We  are  very  greatly  indebted  to  you,  gentlemen,  for  so 
kindly  indulging  her  whim.  [The  dressing  bell  sounds.  The 
Count  looks  at  his  watch].  Ah!  The  dressing  bell,  gentle- 
men. As  our  play  begins  at  nine,  I  have  had  to  put  for- 
ward the  dinner  hour  a  little.  May  I  shew  you  to  your 
rooms?  [He  goes  out,  followed  by  all  the  men,  except  Trotter, 
who,  going  last,  is  detained  by  Fanny]. 

Fanny.  Mr  Trotter:  I  want  to  say  something  to  you 
about  this  play. 

Trotter.  No:  thats  forbidden.  You  must  not  attempt 
to  souffler  the  critic. 

Fanny.  Oh,  I  would  not  for  the  world  try  to  influence 
your  opinion. 

Trotter.    But  you   do:  you  are  influencing   me  very 


172  Fanny's  First  Play 

shockingly.  You  invite  me  to  this  charming  house,  where 
I'm  about  to  enjoy  a  charming  dinner.  And  just  before 
the  dinner  I'm  taken  aside  by  a  charming  young  lady  to 
be  talked  to  about  the  play.  How  can  you  expect  me  to 
be  impartial?  God  forbid  that  I  should  set  up  to  be  a 
judge,  or  do  more  than  record  an  impression;  but  my  im- 
pressions can  be  influenced;  and  in  this  case  youre  in- 
fluencing them  shamelessly  all  the  time. 

Fanny.  Dont  make  me  more  nervous  than  I  am  al- 
ready, Mr  Trotter.     If  you  knew  how  I  feel ! 

Trottee.  Naturally :  your  first  party :  your  first  appear- 
ance in  England  as  hostess.  But  youre  doing  it  beauti- 
fully.    Dont  be  afraid.     Every  nuance  is  perfect. 

Fanny.  It's  so  kind  of  you  to  say  so,  Mr  Trotter.  But 
that  isnt  whats  the  matter.  The  truth  is,  this  play  is 
going  to  give  my  father  a  dreadful  shock. 

Trotter.  Nothing  unusual  in  that,  I'm  sorry  to  say. 
Half  the  young  ladies  in  London  spend  their  evenings 
making  their  fathers  take  them  to  plays  that  are  not  fit 
for  elderly  people  to  see. 

Fanny.  Oh,  I  know  all  about  that;  but  you  cant  under- 
stand what  it  means  to  Papa.  Youre  not  so  innocent  as 
he  is. 

Trotter  [remonstrating]    My  dear  young  lady — 

Fanny.  I  dont  mean  morally  innocent:  everybody  who 
reads  your  articles  knows  youre  as  innocent  as  a  lamb. 

Trotter.    What ! 

Fanny.  Yes,  Mr  Trotter:  Ive  seen  a  good  deal  of  life 
since  I  came  to  England;  and  I  assure  you  that  to  me  youre 
a  mere  baby:  a  dear,  good,  well-meaning,  delightful,  witty, 
charming  baby;  but  still  just  a  wee  lamb  in  a  world  of 
wolves.    Cambridge  is  not  what  it  was  in  my  father's  time. 

Trotter.    Well,  I  must  say! 

Fanny.  Just  so.  Thats  one  of  our  classifications  in  the 
Cambridge  Fabian  Society. 

Trotter.    Classifications?    I  dont  understand. 


Fanny's  First  Play  173 

Fanny.  We  classify  our  aunts  into  different  sorts. 
And  one  of  the  sorts  is  the  "I  must  says." 

Trotter.  I  withdraw  "I  must  say."  I  substitute 
"  Blame  my  cats ! "  No :  I  substitute  "  Blame  my  kittens ! " 
Observe,  Miss  O'Dowda:  kittens.  I  say  again  in  the  teeth 
of  the  whole  Cambridge  Fabian  Society,  kittens.  Imper- 
tinent little  kittens.  Blame  them.  Smack  them.  I  guess 
what  is  on  your  conscience.  This  play  to  which  you  have 
lured  'me  is  one  of  those  in  which  members  of  Fabian 
Societies  instruct  their  grandmothers  in  the  art  of  milking 
ducks.  And  you  are  afraid  it  will  shock  your  father.  Well, 
I  hope  it  will.  And  if  he  consults  me  about  it  I  shall 
recommend  him  to  smack  you  soundly  and  pack  you  off 
to  bed. 

Fanny.  Thats  one  of  your  prettiest  literary  attitudes, 
Mr  Trotter;  but  it  doesnt  take  me  in.  You  see,  I'm  much 
more  conscious  of  what  you  really  are  than  you  are  your- 
self, because  weve  discussed  you  thoroughly  at  Cambridge; 
and  youve  never  discussed  yourself,  have  you? 

Trotter.    I 

Fanny.  Of  course  you  havnt;  so  you  see  it's  no  good 
Trottering  at  me. 

Trotter.    Trottering! 

Fanny.    Thats  what  we  call  it  at  Cambridge. 

Trotter.  If  it  were  not  so  obviously  a  stage  cliche,  I 
should  say  Damn  Cambridge.  As  it  is,  I  blame  my  kittens. 
And  now  let  me  warn  you.  If  youre  going  to  be  a  charming 
healthy  young  English  girl,  you  may  coax  me.  If  youre 
going  to  be  an  unsexed  Cambridge  Fabian  virago,  I'll 
treat  you  as  my  intellectual  equal,  as  I  would  treat  a  man. 

Fanny  [adoringly]  But  how  few  men  are  your  intel- 
lectual equals,  Mr  Trotter! 

Trotter.    I'm  getting  the  worst  of  this. 

Fanny.    Oh  no.     Why  do  you  say  that? 

Trotter.  May£l  remind  you  that  the  dinner-bell  will 
ring  presently? 


174  Fanny's  First  Play 

Fanny.  What  does  it  matter?  We're  both  ready.  I 
havnt  told  you  yet  what  I  want  you  to  do  for  me. 

Trotter.  Nor  have  you  particularly  predisposed  me  to 
do  it,  except  out  of  pure  magnanimity.     What  is  it? 

Fanny.  I  dont  mind  this  play  shocking  my  father  mor- 
ally. It's  good  for  him  to  be  shocked  morally.  It's  all 
that  the  young  can  do  for  the  old,  to  shock  them  and  keep 
them  up  to  date.  But  I  know  that  this  play  will  shock 
him  artistically;  and  that  terrifies  me.  No  moral  consid- 
eration could  make  a  breach  between  us:  he  would  forgive 
me  for  anything  of  that  kind  sooner  or  later;  but  he  never 
gives  way  on  a  point  of  art.  I  darent  let  him  know  that 
I  love  Beethoven  and  Wagner;  and  as  to  Strauss,  if  he  heard 
three  bars  of  Elektra,  it'd  part  us  for  ever.  Now  what 
I  want  you  to  do  is  this.  If  hes  very  angry — if  he  hates 
the  play,  because  it's  a  modern  play — will  you  tell  him 
that  it's  not  my  fault;  that  its  style  and  construction,  and 
so  forth,  are  considered  the  very  highest  art  nowadays; 
that  the  author  wrote  it  in  the  proper  way  for  repertory 
theatres  of  the  most  superior  kind — you  know  the  kind 
of  plays  I  mean? 

Trotter  [emphatically]  I  think  I  know  the  sort  of 
entertainments  you  mean.  But  please  do  not  beg  a 
vital  question  by  calling  them  plays.  I  dont  pretend  to 
be  an  authority;  but  I  have  at  least  established  the  fact 
that  these  productions,  whatever  else  they  may  be,  are 
certainly  not  plays. 

Fanny.    The  authors  dont  say  they  are. 

Trotter  [warmly]  I  am  aware  that  one  author,  who  is, 
I  blush  to  say,  a  personal  friend  of  mine,  resorts  freely  to 
the  dastardly  subterfuge  of  calling  them  conversations, 
discussions,  and  so  forth,  with  the  express  object  of  evad- 
ing criticism.  But  I'm  not  to  be  disarmed  by  such  tricks. 
I  say  they  are  not  plays.  Dialogues,  if  you  will.  Exhibi- 
tions of  character,  perhaps:  especially  the  character  of  the 
author.     Fictions,   possibly,  though  a  little  decent  reti- 


Fanny's  First  Play  175 

cence  as  to  introducing  actual  persons,  and  thus  violating 
the  sanctity  of  private  life,  might  not  be  amiss.  But  plays, 
no.  I  say  NO.  Not  plays.  If  you  will  not  concede  this 
point  I  cant  continue  ourj  conversation.  I  take  this  se- 
riously. It's  a  matter  of  principle.  I  must  ask  you,  Miss 
O'Dowda,  before  we  go  a  step  further,  Do  you  or  do  you 
not  claim  that  these  works  are  plays? 

Fanny.    I  assure  you  I  dont. 

Trotter.    Not  in  any  sense  of  the  word? 

Fanny.    Not  in  anjr  sense  of  the  word.    I  loathe  plays. 

Trotter  [disappointed]  That  last  remark  destroys  all 
the  value  of  your  admission.  You  admire  these — these 
theatrical  nondescripts?    You  enjoy  them? 

Fanny.    Dont  you? 

Trotter.  Of  course  I  do.  Do  you  take  me  for  a  fool? 
Do  you  suppose  I  prefer  popular  melodramas?  Have  I 
not  written  most  appreciative  notices  of  them?  But 
I  say  theyre  not  plays.  Theyre  not  plays.  I  cant  con- 
sent to  remain  in  this  house  another  minute  if  anything 
remotely  resembling  them  is  to  be  foisted  on  me  as  a 
play. 

Fanny.  I  fully  admit  that  theyre  not  plays.  I  only 
want  you  to  tell  my  father  that  plays  are  not  plays  now- 
adays— not  in  your  sense  of  the  word. 

Trotter.  Ah,  there  you  go  again!  In  my  sense  of  the 
word!  You  believe  that  my  criticism  is  merely  a  personal 
impression;  that — 

Fanny.    You  always  said  it  was. 

Trotter.  Pardon  me:  not  on  this  point.  If  you  had 
been  classically  educated — 

Fanny.    But  I  have. 

Trotter.  Pooh!  Cambridge!  If  you  had  been  educated 
at  Oxford,  you  would  know  that  the  definition  of  a  play 
has  been  settled  exactly  and  scientifically  for  two  thousand 
two  hundred  and  sixty  years.  When  I  say  that  these  en- 
tertainments are  not  plays,  I  dont  mean  in  my  sense  of 


176  Fanny's  First  Play 

the  word,  but  in  the  sense  given  to  it  for  all  time  by  the 
immortal  Stagirite. 

Fanny.    Who  is  the  Stagirite? 

Trotter  [shocked]  You  dont  know  who  the  Stagirite 
was? 

Fanny.    Sorry.     Never  heard  of  him. 

Trotter.  And  this  is  Cambridge  education!  Well,  my 
dear  young  lady,  I'm  delighted  to  find  theres  something 
you  don't  know;  and  I  shant  spoil  you  by  dispelling  an 
ignorance  which,  in  my  opinion,  is  highly  becoming  to  your 
age  and  sex.     So  we'll  leave  it  at  that. 

Fanny.  But  you  will  promise  to  tell  my  father  that  lots 
of  people  write  plays  just  like  this  one — that  I  havnt 
selected  it  out  of  mere  heartlessness? 

Trotter.  I  cant  possibly  tell  you  what  I  shall  say  to 
your  father  about  the  play  until  Ive  seen  the  play.  But 
I'll  tell  you  what  I  shall  say  to  him  about  you.  I  shall 
say  that  youre  a  very  foolish  young  lady;  that  youve 
got  into  a  very  questionable  set;  and  that  the  sooner  he 
takes  you  away  from  Cambridge  and  its  Fabian  Society, 
the  better. 

Fanny.  It's  so  funny  to  hear  you  pretending  to  be  a 
heavy  father.  In  Cambridge  we  regard  you  as  a  bel  esprit, 
a  wit,  an  Irresponsible,  a  Parisian  Immoralist,  tres  chic. 

Trotter.    I ! 

Fanny.    Theres  quite  a  Trotter  set. 

Trotter.    Well,  upon  my  word! 

Fanny.    They  go  in  for  adventures  and  call  you  Aramis. 

Trotter.    They  wouldnt  dare! 

Fanny.  You  always  make  such  delicious  fun  of  the 
serious  people.     Your  insouciance — 

Trotter  [frantic]  Stop  talking  French  to  me:  it's  not 
a  proper  language  for  a  young  girl.  Great  heavens!  how 
is  it  possible  that  a  few  innocent  pleasantries  should  be  so 
frightfully  misunderstood?  Ive  tried  all  my  life  to  be  sin- 
cere and  simple,  to  be  unassuming  and  kindly.     Ive  lived 


Fanny's  First  Play  177 

a  blameless  life.  Ive  supported  the  Censorship  in  the  face 
of  ridicule  and  insult.  And  now  I'm  told  that  I'm  a  centre 
of  Immoralism!  of  Modern  Minxism!  a  trifler  with  the  most 
sacred  subjects!    a  Nietzschean ! !    perhaps  a  Shavian!!! 

Fanny.  Do  you  mean  you  are  really  on  the  serious  side, 
Mr  Trotter? 

Trotter.  Of  course  I'm  on  the  serious  side.  How  dare 
you  ask  me  such  a  question? 

Fanny.    Then  why  dont  you  play  for  it? 

Trotter.  I  do  play  for  it — short,  of  course,  of  making 
myself  ridiculous. 

Fanny.  What!  not  make  yourself  ridiculous  for  the 
sake  of  a  good  cause!     Oh,  Mr  Trotter.     Thats  vieux  jeu. 

Trotter  [shouting  at  her]  Dont  talk  French.  I  will  not 
allow  it. 

Fanny.  But  this  dread  of  ridicule  is  so  frightfully  out 
of  date.     The  Cambridge  Fabian  Society — 

Trotter.  I  forbid  you  to  mention  the  Fabian  Society 
to  me. 

Fanny.  Its  motto  is  "You  cannot  learn  to  skate  without 
making  yourself  ridiculous." 

Trotter.    Skate!     What  has  that  to  do  with  it? 

Fanny.  Thats  not  all.  It  goes  on,  "The  ice  of  life  is 
slippery." 

Trotter.  Ice  of  life  indeed!  You  should  be  eating 
penny  ices  and  enjoying  yourself.  I  wont  hear  another 
word. 

The  Count  returns. 

The  Count.  We're  all  waiting  in  the  drawing-room,  my 
dear.    Have  you  been  detaining  Mr  Trotter  all  this  time? 

Trotter.  I'm  so  sorry.  I  must  have  just  a  little  brush 
up:  I —    [He  hurries  out}. 

The  Count.  My  dear,  you  should  be  in  the  drawing- 
room.     You  should  not  have  kept  him  here. 

Fanny.  I  know.  Dont  scold  me:  I  had  something  im- 
portant to  say  to  him. 


178  Fanny's  First  Play 

The  Count.    I  shall  ask  him  to  take  you  in  to  dinner. 

Fanny.    Yes,  papa.     Oh,  I  hope  it  will  go  off  well. 

The  Count.    Yes,  love,  of  course  it  will.     Come  along. 

Fanny.  Just  one  thing,  papa,  whilst  we're  alone.  Who 
was  the  Stagirite? 

The  Count.  The  Stagirite?  Do  you  mean  to  say  you 
dont  know? 

Fanny.    Havnt  the  least  notion. 

The  Count.  The  Stagirite  was  Aristotle.  By  the  way, 
dont  mention  him  to  Mr  Trotter. 

They  go  to  the  dining-room. 


THE   PLAY 

ACT  I 

In  the  dining-room  of  a  house  in  Denmark  Hill,  an  elderly 
lady  sits  at  breakfast  reading  the  newspaper.  Her  chair  is 
at  the  end  of  the  oblong  dining -table  furthest  from  the  fire. 
There  is  an  empty  chair  at  the  other  end.  The  fireplace  is 
behind  this  chair;  and  the  door  is  next  the  fireplace,  between 
it  and  the  corner.  An  arm-chair  stands  beside  the  coal- 
scuttle. In  the  middle  of  the  back  wall  is  the  sideboard,  par- 
allel to  the  table.  The  rest  of  the  furniture  is  mostly  dining- 
room  chairs,  ranged  against  the  walls,  and  including  a  baby 
rocking-chair  on  the  lady's  side  of  the  room.  The  lady  is  a 
placid  person.  Her  husband,  Mr  Robin  Gilbey,  not  at  all 
placid,  bursts  violently  into  the  room  with  a  letter  in  his  hand. 

Gilbey  [grinding  his  teeth]  This  is  a  nice  thing.  This 
is  a  b — 

Mrs  Gilbey  [cutting  him  short]  Leave  it  at  that,  please. 
Whatever  it  is,  bad  language  wont  make  it  better. 

Gilbey  [bitterly]  Yes,  put  me  in  the  wrong  as  usual. 
Take  your  boy's  part  against  me.  [He  flings  himself  into 
the  empty  chair  opposite  her]. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  When  he  does  anything  right,  hes  your 
son.  When  he  does  anything  wrong  hes  mine.  Have  you 
any  news  of  him? 

Gilbey.   Ive  a  good  mind  not  to  tell  you. 

179 


180  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  I 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Then  dont.  I  suppose  hes  been  found. 
Thats  a  comfort,  at  all  events. 

Gilbey.  No,  he  hasnt  been  found.  The  boy  may  be  at 
the  bottom  of  the  river  for  all  you  care.  [Too  agitated  to 
sit  quietly,  he  rises  and  paces  the  room  distractedly]. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Then  what  have  you  got  in  your  hand? 

Gilbey.  Ive  a  letter  from  the  Monsignor  Grenfell. 
From  New  York.  Dropping  us.  Cutting  us.  [Turning 
fiercely  on  her]  Thats  a  nice  thing,  isnt  it? 

Mrs  Gilbey.    What  for? 

Gilbey  [flinging  away  towards  his  chair]  How  do  I  know 
what  for? 

Mrs  Gilbey.    What  does  he  say? 

Gilbey  [sitting  down  and  grumblingly  adjusting  his  spec- 
tacles] This  is  what  he  says.  "My  dear  Mr  Gilbey:  The 
news  about  Bobby  had  to  follow  me  across  the  Atlantic: 
it  did  not  reach  me  until  to-day.  I  am  afraid  he  is  incor- 
rigible. My  brother,  as  you  may  imagine,  feels  that  this 
last  escapade  has  gone  beyond  the  bounds;  and  I  think, 
myself,  that  Bobby  ought  to  be  made  to  feel  that  such 
scrapes  involve  a  certain  degree  of  reprobation."  "As 
you  may  imagine"!  And  we  know  no  more  about  it  than 
the  babe  unborn. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    What  else  does  he  say? 

Gilbey.  "I  think  my  brother  must  have  been  just  a 
little  to  blame  himself;  so,  between  ourselves,  I  shall, 
with  due  and  impressive  formality,  forgive  Bobby  later 
on;  but  for  the  present  I  think  it  had  better  be  understood 
that  he  is  in  disgrace,  and  that  we  are  no  longer  on  visit- 
ing terms.  As  ever,  yours  sincerely."  [His  agitation  mas- 
ters him  again]  Thats  a  nice  slap  in  the  face  to  get  from  a 
man  in  his  position!  This  is  what  your  son  has  brought 
on  me. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Well,  I  think  it's  rather  a  nice  letter. 
He  as  good  as  tells  you  hes  only  letting  on  to  be  offended 
for  Bobby's  good. 


Act  I  Fanny's  First  Play  181 

Gilbey.  Oh,  very  well:  have  the  letter  framed  and 
hang  it  up  over  the  mantelpiece  as  a  testimonial. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Dont  talk  nonsense,  Rob.  You  ought  to 
be  thankful  to  know  that  the  boy  is  alive  after  his  dis- 
appearing like  that  for  nearly  a  week. 

Gilbey.  Nearly  a  week!  A  fortnight,  you  mean. 
Wheres  your  feelings,  woman?  It  was  fourteen  days 
yesterday. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Oh,  dont  call  it  fourteen  days,  Rob,  as  if 
the  boy  was  in  prison. 

Gilbey.  How  do  you  know  hes  not  in  prison?  It's  got 
on  my  nerves  so,  that  I'd  believe  even  that. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Dont  talk  silly,  Rob.  Bobby  might  get 
into  a  scrape  like  any  other  lad;  but  he'd  never  do  any- 
thing low. 

Juggins,  the  footman,  comes  in  with  a  card  on  a  salver. 
He  is  a  rather  low-spirited  man  of  thirty-five  or  more,  of  good 
appearance  and  address,  and  iron  self-command. 

Juggins  [presenting  the  salver  to  Mr  Gilbey]  Lady  wishes 
to  see  Mr  Bobby's  parents,  sir. 

Gilbey  [pointing  to  Mrs  Gilbey]  Theres  Mr  Bobby's 
parent.     I  disown  him. 

Juggins.    Yes,  sir.    [He  presents  the  salver  to  Mrs  Gilbey]. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  You  mustnt  mind  what  your  master 
says,  Juggins:  he  doesnt  mean  it.  [She  takes  the  card  and 
reads  it].     Well,  I  never! 

Gilbey.    Whats  up  now? 

Mrs  Gilbey  [reading]  "Miss  D.  Delaney.  Darling 
Dora."  Just  like  that — in  brackets.  What  sort  of  per- 
son, Juggins? 

Gilbey.    Whats  her  address? 

Mrs  Gilbey.  The  West  Circular  Road.  Is  that  a 
respectable  address,  Juggins? 

Juggins.  A  great  many  most  respectable  people  live 
in  the  West  Circular  Road,  madam;  but  the  address  is 
not  a  guarantee  of  respectability. 


182  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  I 

Gilbey.    So  it's  come  to  that  with  him,  has  it? 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Dont  jump  to  conclusions,  Rob.  How 
do  you  know?  [To  Juggins]  Is  she  a  lady,  Juggins? 
You  know  what  I  mean. 

Juggins.  In  the  sense  in  which  you  are  using  the  word, 
no,  madam. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  I'd  better  try  what  I  can  get  out  of 
her.  [To  Juggins]  Shew  her  up.  You  dont  mind,  do 
you,  Rob? 

Gilbey.  So  long  as  you  dont  flounce  out  and  leave  me 
alone  with  her.  [He  rises  and  plants  himself  on  the  hearth- 
rug]. 

Juggins  goes  out. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    I  wonder  what  she  wants,  Rob? 

Gilbey.  If  she  wants  money,  she  shant  have  it.  Not  a 
farthing.  A  nice  thing,  everybody  seeing  her  on  our 
doorstep!  If  it  wasnt  that  she  may  tell  us  something  about 
the  lad,  I'd  have  Juggins  put  the  hussy  into  the  street. 

Juggins  [returning  and  announcing]  Miss  Delaney.  [He 
waits  for  express  orders  before  placing  a  chair  for  this 
visitor] . 

Miss  Delaney  comes  in.  She  is  a  young  lady  of  hilarious 
disposition,  very  tolerable  good  looks,  and  killing  clothes. 
Site  is  so  affable  and  confidential  that  it  is  very  difficult  to  keep 
her  at  a  distance  by  any  process  short  of  flinging  her  out  of  the 
house. 

Dora  [plunging  at  once  into  privileged  intimacy  and  into 
the  middle  of  the  room]  How  d'ye  do,  both.  I'm  a  friend  of 
Bobby's.  He  told  me  all  about  you  once,  in  a  moment  of 
confidence.  Of  course  he  never  let  on  who  he  was  at  the 
police  court. 

Gilbey.    Police  court! 

Mrs  Gilbey  [looking  apprehensively  at  Juggins]  Teh—! 
Juggins:  a  chair. 

Dora.  Oh,  Ive  let  it  out,  have  I!  [Contemplating  Jug- 
gins approvingly  as  he  places  a  chair  for  her  between  the 


Act  I  Fanny's  First  Play  183 

table  and  the  sideboard]  But  lies  the  right  sort:  I  can  see 
that.  [Buttonholing  him]  You  wont  let  on  downstairs, 
old  man,  will  you? 

Juggins.  The  family  can  rely  on  my  absolute  discre- 
tion.    [He  withdraws]. 

Dora  [sitting  down  genteelly]  I  dont  know  what  youll 
say  to  me:  you  know  I  really  have  no  right  to  come  here; 
but  then  what  was  I  to  do?  You  know  Holy  Joe,  Bobby's 
tutor,  dont  you?    But  of  course  you  do. 

Gilbey  [with  dignity]  I  know  Mr  Joseph  Grenfell,  the 
brother  of  Monsignor  Grenfell,  if  it  is  of  him  you  are 
speaking. 

Dora  [wide-eyed  and  much  amused]  No!!!  You  dont 
tell  me  that  old  geezer  has  a  brother  a  Monsignor!  And 
youre  Catholics!  And  I  never  knew  it,  though  Ive  known 
Bobby  ever  so  long!  But  of  course  the  last  thing  you  find 
out  about  a  person  is  their  religion,  isnt  it? 

Mrs  Gilbey.  We're  not  Catholics.  But  when  the 
Samuelses  got  an  Archdeacon's  son  to  form  their  boy's 
mind,  Mr  Gilbey  thought  Bobby  ought  to  have  a  chance 
too.  And  the  Monsignor  is  a  customer.  Mr  Gilbey  con- 
sulted him  about  Bobby;  and  he  recommended  a  brother 
of  his  that  was  more  sinned  against  than  sinning. 

Gilbey  [on  tenterhooks]  She  dont  want  to  hear  about 
that,  Maria.     [To  Dora]  Whats  your  business? 

Dora.    I'm  afraid  it  was  all  my  fault. 

Gilbey.  What  was  all  your  fault?  I'm  half  distracted. 
I  dont  know  what  has  happened  to  the  boy:  hes  been 
lost  these  fourteen  days — 

Mrs  Gilbey.    A  fortnight,  Rob. 

Gilbey.    — and  not  a  word  have  we  heard  of  him  since. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Dont  fuss,  Rob. 

Gilbey  [yelling]  I  will  fuss.  Youve  no  feeling.  You 
dont  care  what  becomes  of  the  lad.    [He  sits  down  savagely]. 

Dora  [soothingly]  Youve  been  anxious  about  him.  Of 
course.     How  thoughtless  of  me  not  to  begin  by  telling 


184  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  I 

you  hes  quite  safe.     Indeed  hes  in  the  safest  place  in  the 
world,  as  one  may  say:    safe  under  lock  and  key. 

Gilbey  [horrified,  'pitiable]  Oh  my —  [his  breath  fails 
him].  Do  you  mean  that  when  he  was  in  the  police  court 
he  was  in  the  dock?  Oh,  Maria!  Oh,  great  Lord!  What 
has  he  done?  What  has  he  got  for  it?  [Desperate]  Will 
you  tell  me  or  will  you  see  me  go  mad  on  my  own  carpet? 

Dora  [siveetly]    Yes,  old  dear — 

Mrs  Gilbey  [starting  at  the  familiarity]    Well! 

Dora  [continuing]  I'll  tell  you:  but  dont  you  worry: 
hes  all  right.  I  came  out  myself  this  morning:  there 
was  such  a  crowd!  and  a  band!  they  thought  I  was  a 
suffragette:  only  fancy!  You  see  it  was  like  this.  Holy 
Joe  got  talking  about  how  he'd  been  a  champion  sprinter 
at  college. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    A  what? 

Dora.  A  sprinter.  He  said  he  was  the  fastest  hundred 
yards  runner  in  England.  We  were  all  in  the  old  cowshed 
that  night. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    What  old  cowshed? 

Gilbey  [groaning]    Oh,  get  on.     Get  on. 

Dora.  Oh,  of  course  you  wouldnt  know.  How  silly  of 
me!  It's  a  rather  go-ahead  sort  of  music  hall  in  Stepney. 
We  call  it  the  old  cowshed. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Does  Mr  Grenfell  take  Bobby  to  music 
halls? 

Dora.  No.  Bobby  takes  him.  But  Holy  Joe  likes  it: 
fairly  laps  it  up  like  a  kitten,  poor  old  dear.  Well,  Bobby 
says  to  me,  "Darling — " 

Mrs  Gilbey  [placidly]    Why  does  he  call  you  Darling? 

Dora.  Oh,  everybody  calls  me  Darling:  it's  a  sort  of 
name  Ive  got.  Darling  Dora,  you  know.  Well,  he  says, 
"Darling,  if  you  can  get  Holy  Joe  to  sprint  a  hundred  yards, 
I'll  stand  you  that  squiffer  with  the  gold  keys." 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Does  he  call  his  tutor  Holy  Joe  to  his  face 
[Gilbey  clutches  at  his  hair  in  his  impatience]. 


Act  I  Fanny's  First  Play  185 

Doha.  Well,  what  would  he  call  him?  After  all,  Holy 
Joe  is  Holy  Joe;   and  boys  will  be  boys. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Whats  a  squiffer? 

Dora.  Oh,  of  course:  excuse  my  vulgarity:  a  concer- 
tina. Theres  one  in  a  shop  in  Green  Street,  ivory  inlaid, 
with  gold  keys  and  Russia  leather  bellows;  and  Bobby 
knew  I  hankered  after  it;  but  he  couldnt  afford  it,  poor 
lad,  though  I  knew  he  just  longed  to  give  it  to  me. 

Gilbey.  Maria:  if  you  keep  interrupting  with  silly 
questions,  I  shall  go  out  of  my  senses.  Heres  the  boy  in 
gaol  and  me  disgraced  for  ever;  and  all  you  care  to  know  is 
what  a  squiffer  is. 

Dora.  Well,  remember  it  has  gold  keys.  The  man 
wouldnt  take  a  penny  less  than  £15  for  it.  It  was  a 
presentation  one. 

Gilbey  [shouting  at  her]  Wheres  my  son?  Whats  hap- 
pened to  my  son?  Will  you  tell  me  that,  and  stop  cack- 
ling about  your  squiffer? 

Dora.  Oh,  aint  we  impatient!  Well,  it  does  you  credit, 
old  dear.  And  you  neednt  fuss:  theres  no  disgrace.  Bobby 
behaved  like  a  perfect  gentleman.  Besides,  it  was  all  my 
fault.  I'll  own  it:  I  took  too  much  champagne.  I  was  not 
what  you  might  call  drunk;  but  I  was  bright,  and  a  little 
beyond  myself;  and — I'll  confess  it — I  wanted  to  shew 
off  before  Bobby,  because  he  was  a  bit  taken  by  a  woman 
on  the  stage;  and  she  was  pretending  to  be  game  for  any- 
thing. You  see  youve  brought  Bobby  up  too  strict;  and 
when  he  gets  loose  theres  no  holding  him.  He  does 
enjoy  life  more  than  any  lad  I  ever  met. 

Gilbey.  Never  you  mind  how  hes  been  brought  up: 
thats  my  business.  Tell  me  how  hes  been  brought  down : 
thats  yours. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Oh,  dont  be  rude  to  the  lady,  Rob. 

Dora.  I'm  coming  to  it,  old  dear:  dont  you  be  so  head- 
strong. Well,  it  was  a  beautiful  moonlight  night;  and  we 
couldnt  get  a  cab  on  the  nod;   so  we  started  to  walk,  very 


186  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  I 

jolly,  you  know:  arm  in  arm,  and  dancing  along,  singing 
and  all  that.  When  we  came  into  Jamaica  Square,  there 
was  a  young  copper  on  point  duty  at  the  corner.  I  says  to 
Bob:  "Dearie  boy:  is  it  a  bargain  about  the  squiffer  if  I 
make  Joe  sprint  for  you?"  "Anything  you  like,  darling," 
says  he:  "I  love  you."  I  put  on  my  best  company  man- 
ners and  stepped  up  to  the  copper.  "If  you  please,  sir," 
says  I,  "can  you  direct  me  to  Carrickmines  Square?"  I 
was  so  genteel,  and  talked  so  sweet,  that  he  fell  to  it  like  a 
bird.  "I  never  heard  of  any  such  Square  in  these  parts," 
he  says.  "Then,"  says  I,  "what  a  very  silly  little  officer 
you  must  be!";  and  I  gave  his  helmet  a  chuck  behind  that 
knocked  it  over  his  eyes,  and  did  a  bunk. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Did  a  what? 

Dora.  A  bunk.  Holy  Joe  did  one  too  all  right:  he 
sprinted  faster  than  he  ever  did  in  college,  I  bet,  the  old 
dear.  He  got  clean  off,  too.  Just  as  he  was  overtaking  me 
half-way  down  the  square,  we  heard  the  whistle;  and  at 
the  sound  of  it  he  drew  away  like  a  streak  of  lightning; 
and  that  was  the  last  I  saw  of  him.  I  was  copped  in  the 
Dock  Road  myself:  rotten  luck,  wasn't  it?  I  tried  the 
innocent  and  genteel  and  all  the  rest;  but  Bobby's  hat 
done  me  in. 

Gilbey.    And  what  happened  to  the  boy? 

Dora.  Only  fancy!  he  stopped  to  laugh  at  the  copper! 
He  thought  the  copper  would  see  the  joke,  poor  lamb.  He 
was  arguing  about  it  when  the  two  that  took  me  came 
along  to  find  out  what  the  whistle  was  for,  and  brought  me 
with  them.  Of  course  I  swore  I'd  never  seen  him  before  in 
my  life;  but  there  he  was  in  my  hat  and  I  in  his.  The  cops 
were  very  spiteful  and  laid  it  on  for  all  they  were  worth: 
drunk  and  disorderly  and  assaulting  the  police  and  all  that. 
I  got  fourteen  days  without  the  option,  because  you  see — 
well,  the  fact  is,  I'd  done  it  before,  and  been  warned. 
Bobby  was  a  first  offender  and  had  the  option;  but  the 
dear  boy  had  no  money  left  and  wouldnt  give  you  away 


Act  I  Fanny's  First  Play  187 

by  telling  his  name;  and  anyhow  he  couldnt  have  brought 
himself  to  buy  himself  off  and  leave  me  there;  so  lies  doing 
his  time.  Well,  it  was  two  forty  shillingses;  and  Ive  only 
twenty-eight  shillings  in  the  world.  If  I  pawn  my  clothes 
I  shant  be  able  to  earn  any  more.  So  I  cant  pay  the  fine 
and  get  him  out;  but  if  youll  stand  £3  I'll  stand  one;  and 
thatll  do  it.  If  youd  like  to  be  very  kind  and  nice  you 
could  pay  the  lot;  but  I  cant  deny  that  it  was  my  fault; 
so  I  wont  press  you. 

Gilbey  [heart-broken]    My  son  in  gaol! 

Dora.  Oh,  cheer  up,  old  dear:  it  wont  hurt  him:  look 
at  me  after  fourteen  days  of  it;  I'm  all  the  better  for 
being  kept  a  bit  quiet.  You  mustnt  let  it  prey  on  your 
mind. 

Gilbey.  The  disgrace  of  it  will  kill  me.  And  it  will 
leave  a  mark  on  him  to  the  end  of  his  life. 

Dora.  Not  a  bit  of  it.  Dont  you  be  afraid:  Ive  edu- 
cated Bobby  a  bit:  hes  not  the  mollycoddle  he  was  when 
you  had  him  in  hand. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Indeed  Bobby  is  not  a  mollycoddle. 
They  wanted  him  to  go  in  for  singlestick  at  the  Young 
Men's  Christian  Association;  but,  of  course,  I  couldnt 
allow  that:   he  might  have  had  his  eye  knocked  out. 

Gilbey  [to  Dora,  angrily]    Listen  here,  you. 

Dora.    Oh,  aint  we  cross! 

Gilbey.  I  want  none  of  your  gaiety  here.  This  is  a 
respectable  household.  Youve  gone  and  got  my  poor 
innocent  boy  into  trouble.  It's  the  like  of  you  thats  the 
ruin  of  the  like  of  him. 

Dora.  So  you  always  say,  you  old  dears.  But  you 
know  better.     Bobby  came  to  me:    I  didnt  come  to  him. 

Gilbey.  Would  he  have  gone  if  you  hadnt  been  there 
for  him  to  go  to?  Tell  me  that.  You  know  why  he  went 
to  you,  I  suppose? 

Dora  [charitably]  It  was  dull  for  him  at  home,  poor 
lad,  wasnt  it? 


188  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  I 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Oh  no.  I'm  at  home  on  first  Thursdays. 
And  we  have  the  Knoxes  to  dinner  every  Friday.  Mar- 
garet Knox  and  Bobby  are  as  good  as  engaged.  Mr  Knox 
is  my  husband's  partner.  Mrs  Knox  is  very  religious; 
but  shes  quite  cheerful.  We  dine  with  them  on  Tuesdays. 
So  thats  two  evenings  pleasure  every  week. 

Gilbey  [almost  in  tears]  We  done  what  we  could  for  the 
boy.  Short  of  letting  him  go  into  temptations  of  all  sorts, 
he  can  do  what  he  likes.    What  more  does  he  want? 

Dora.  Well,  old  dear,  he  wants  me;  and  thats  about 
the  long  and  short  of  it.  And  I  must  say  youre  not  very 
nice  to  me  about  it.  Ive  talked  to  him  like  a  mother, 
and  tried  my  best  to  keep  him  straight;  but  I  dont  deny 
I  like  a  bit  of  fun  myself;  and  we  both  get  a  bit 
giddy  when  we're  lighthearted.  Him  and  me  is  a  pair, 
I'm  afraid. 

Gilbey.  Dont  talk  foolishness,  girl.  How  could  you 
and  he  be  a  pair,  you  being  what  you  are,  and  he  brought 
up  as  he  has  been,  with  the  example  of  a  religious  woman 
like  Mrs  Knox  before  his  eyes?  I  cant  understand  how 
he  could  bring  himself  to  be  seen  in  the  street  with  you. 
[Pitying  himself]  I  havnt  deserved  this.  Ive  done  my 
duty  as  a  father.  Ive  kept  him  sheltered.  [Angry  with 
her]  Creatures  like  you  that  take  advantage  of  a  child's 
innocence  ought  to  be  whipped  through  the  streets. 

Dora.  Well,  whatever  I  may  be,  I'm  too  much  the  lady 
to  lose  my  temper;  and  I  dont  think  Bobby  would  like  me 
to  tell  you  what  I  think  of  you;  for  when  I  start  giving 
people  a  bit  of  my  mind  I  sometimes  use  language  thats 
beneath  me.  But  I  tell  you  once  for  all  I  must  have  the 
money  to  get  Bobby  out;  and  if  you  wont  fork  out,  I'll 
hunt  up  Holy  Joe.  He  might  get  it  off  his  brother,  the 
Monsignor. 

Gilbey.  You  mind  your  own  concerns.  My  solicitor 
will  do  what  is  right.  I'll  not  have  you  paying  my  son's 
fine  as  if  you  were  anything  to  him. 


Act  I  Fanny's  First  Play  189 

Dora.  Thats  right.  Youll  get  him  out  today,  wont 
you? 

Gilbey.    It's  likely  I'd  leave  my  boy  in  prison,  isnt  it? 

Dora.    I'd  like  to  know  when  theyll  let  him  out. 

Gilbey.  You  would,  would  you?  Youre  going  to  meet 
him  at  the  prison  door. 

Dora.  Well,  dont  you  think  any  woman  would  that 
had  the  feelings  of  a  lady? 

Gilbey  [bitterly]  Oh  yes:  I  know.  Here!  I  must  buy 
the  lad's  salvation,  I  suppose.  How  much  will  you  take  to 
clear  out  and  let  him  go? 

Dora  [pitying  him:  quite  nice  about  it]  What  good  would 
that  do,  old  dear?    There  are  others,  you  know. 

Gilbey.    Thats  true.    I  must  send  the  boy  himself  away. 

Dora.    Where  to? 

Gilbey.  Anywhere,  so  long  as  hes  out  of  the  reach  of 
you  and  your  like. 

Dora.  Then  I'm  afraid  youll  have  to  send  him  out  of 
the  world,  old  dear.  I'm  sorry  for  you:  I  really  am, 
though  you  mightnt  believe  it;  and  I  think  your  feelings 
do  you  real  credit.  But  I  cant  give  him  up  just  to  let  him 
fall  into  the  hands  of, people  I  couldnt  trust,  can  I? 

Gilbey  [beside  himself,  rising]  Wheres  the  police? 
Wheres  the  Government?  Wheres  the  Church?  Wheres 
respectability  and  right  reason?  Whats  the  good  of  them 
if  I  have  to  stand  here  and  see  you  put  my  son  in  your 
pocket  as  if  he  was  a  chattel  slave,  and  you  hardly  out  of 
gaol  as  a  common  drunk  and  disorderly?  Whats  the 
world  coming  to? 

Dora.    It  is  a  lottery,  isnt  it,  old  dear? 

Mr  Gilbey  rushes  from  the  room,  distracted. 

Mrs  Gilbey  [unruffled]  Where  did  you  buy  that  white 
lace?  I  want  some  to  match  a  collaret  of  my  own;  and  I 
cant  get  it  at  Perry  and  John's. 

Dora.  Knagg  and  Pantle's:  one  and  fourpence.  It's 
machine  hand-made. 


190  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  I 

Mrs  Gilbey.  I  never  give  more  than  one  and  tuppence. 
But  I  suppose  youre  extravagant  by  nature.  My  sister 
Martha  was  just  like  that.  Pay  anything  she  was 
asked. 

Dora.    Whats  tuppence  to  you,  Mrs  Bobby,  after  all? 

Mrs  Gilbey  [correcting  her]    Mrs  Gilbey. 

Dora.    Of  course,  Mrs  Gilbey.    lam  silly. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Bobby  must  have  looked  funny  in  your 
hat.     Why  did  you  change  hats  with  him? 

Dora.    I  dont  know.     One  does,  you  know. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  I  never  did.  The  things  people  do!  I 
cant  understand  them.  Bobby  never  told  me  he  was 
keeping  company  with  you.     His  own  mother! 

Dora  [overcome]    Excuse  me:   I  cant  help  smiling. 

Juggins  enters. 

Juggins.  Mr  Gilbey  has  gone  to  Wormwood  Scrubbs, 
madam. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Have  you  ever  been  in  a  police  court, 
Juggins? 

Juggins.    Yes,  madam. 

Mrs  Gilbey  [rather  shocked]  I  hope  you  had  not  been 
exceeding,  Juggins. 

Juggins.    Yes,  madam,  I  had.  I  exceeded  the  legal  limit. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Oh,  that!  Why  do  they  give  a  woman  a 
fortnight  for  wearing  a  man's  hat,  and  a  man  a  month  for 
wearing  hers? 

Juggins.    I  didnt  know  that  they  did,  madam. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  It  doesnt  seem  justice,  does  it,  Juggins? 

Juggins.    No,  madam. 

Mrs  Gilbey  [to  Dora,  rising]  Well,  good-bye.  [Shaking 
her  hand]    So  pleased  to  have  made  your  acquaintance. 

Dora  [standing  up]  Dont  mention  it.  I'm  sure  it's 
most  kind  of  you  to  receive  me  at  all. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  I  must  go  off  now  and  order  lunch.  [She 
trots  to  the  door].    What  was  it  you  called  the  concertina? 

Dora.    A  squiffer,  dear. 


Act  I  Fanny's  First  Play  191 

Mrs  Gilbey  [thoughtfully]  A  squiffer,  of  course.  How 
funny!     [She  goes  out]. 

Dora  [exploding  into  ecstasies  of  mirth]  Oh  my!  isnt  she 
an  old  love?     How  do  you  keep  your  face  straight? 

Juggins.    It  is  what  I  am  paid  for. 

Dora  [confidentially]  Listen  here,  dear  boy.  Your  name 
isnt  Juggins.     Nobody's  name  is  Juggins. 

Juggins.  My  orders  are,  Miss  Delaney,  that  you  are 
not  to  be  here  when  Mr  Gilbey  returns  from  Wormwood 
Scrubbs. 

Dora.  That  means  telling  me  to  mind  my  own  business, 
doesnt  it?  Well,  I'm  off.  Tootle  Loo,  Charlie  Darling. 
[She  kisses  her  hand  to  him  and  goes]. 


ACT  II 

On  the  afternoon  of  the  same  day,  Mrs  Knox  is  writing 
notes  in  her  drawing-room,  at  a  writing-table  which  stands 
against  the  wall.  Anyone  placed  so  as  to  see  Mrs  Knox's 
left  profile,  will  have  the  door  on  the  right  and  the  window  on 
the  left,  both  further  away  than  Mrs  Knox,  whose  back  is  pre- 
sented to  an  obsolete  upright  piano  at  the  opposite  side  of  the 
room.  The  sofa  is  near  the  piano.  There  is  a  small  table 
in  the  middle  of  the  room,  with  some  gilt-edged  books  and 
albums  on  it,  and  chairs  near  it. 

Mr  Knox  comes  in  almost  furtively ,  a  troubled  man  of  fifty, 
thinner,  harder,  and  uglier  than  his  partner,  Gilbey,  Gilbey 
being  a  soft  stoutish  man  with  white  hair  and  thin  smooth 
skin,  whilst  Knox  has  coarse  black  hair,  and  blue  jaws  which 
no  diligence  in  shaving  can  whiten.  Mrs  Knox  is  a  plain 
woman,  dressed  without  regard  to  fashion,  with  thoughtful 
eyes  and  thoughtful  ways  that  make  an  atmosphere  of  peace 
and  some  solemnity.  She  is  surprised  to  see  her  husband  at 
home  during  business  hours. 

Mrs  Knox.  What  brings  you  home  at  this  hour?  Have 
you  heard  anything? 

Knox.    No.     Have  you? 

Mrs  Knox.    No.     Whats  the  matter? 

Knox  [sitting  down  on  the  sofa]  I  believe  Gilbey  has 
found  out. 

Mrs  Knox.    What  makes  you  think  that? 

192 


Act  II  Fanny's  First  Play  193 

Knox.  Well,  I  dont  know:  I  didnt  like  to  tell  you:  you 
have  enough  to  worry  you  without  that;  but  Gilbey's  been 
very  queer  ever  since  it  happened.  I  cant  keep  my  mind 
on  business  as  I  ought;  and  I  was  depending  on  him.  But 
hes  worse  than  me.  Hes  not  looking  after  anything;  and 
he  keeps  out  of  my  way.  His  manner's  not  natural.  He 
hasnt  asked  us  to  dinner;  and  hes  never  said  a  word  about 
our  not  asking  him  to  dinner,  after  all  these  years  when 
weve  dined  every  week  as  regular  as  clockwork.  It  looks 
to  me  as  if  Gilbey's  trying  to  drop  me  socially.  Well,  why 
should  he  do  that  if  he  hasnt  heard? 

Mrs  Knox.  I  wonder!  Bobby  hasnt  been  near  us 
either:  thats  what  I  cant  make  out. 

Knox.  Oh,  thats  nothing.  I  told  him  Margaret  was 
down  in  Cornwall  with  her  aunt. 

Mrs  Knox  [reproachfully]  Jo!  [She  takes  her  handker- 
chief from  the  writing-table  and  cries  a  little]. 

Knox.  Well,  I  got  to  tell  lies,  aint  I?  You  wont. 
Somebody's  got  to  tell  em. 

Mrs  Knox  [putting  away  her  handkerchief]  It  only  ends 
in  our  not  knowing  what  to  believe.  Mrs  Gilbey  told  me 
Bobby  was  in  Brighton  for  the  sea  air.  Theres  something 
queer  about  that.  Gilbey  would  never  let  the  boy  loose 
by  himself  among  the  temptations  of  a  gay  place  like 
Brighton  without  his  tutor;  and  I  saw  the  tutor  in  Ken- 
sington High  Street  the  very  day  she  told  me. 

Knox.  If  the  Gilbeys  have  found  out,  it's  all  over  be- 
tween Bobby  and  Margaret,  and  all  over  between  us  and 
them. 

Mrs  Knox.  It's  all  over  between  us  and  everybody. 
When  a  girl  runs  away  from  home  like  that,  people  know 
what  to  think  of  her  and  her  parents. 

Knox.  She  had  a  happy,  respectable  home — every- 
thing— 

Mrs  Knox  [interrupting  him]  Theres  no  use  going  over 
it  all  again,  Jo.     If  a  girl  hasnt  happiness  in  herself,  she 


194  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  II 

wont  be  happy  anywhere.     Youd  better  go  back  to  the 
shop  and  try  to  keep  your  mind  off  it. 

Knox  [rising  restlessly]  I  cant.  I  keep  fancying  every- 
body knows  it  and  is  sniggering  about  it.  I'm  at  peace 
nowhere  but  here.  It's  a  comfort  to  be  with  you.  It's  a 
torment  to  be  with  other  people. 

Mrs  Knox  [goi?ig  to  him  and  drawing  her  arm  through 
his]  There,  Jo,  there!  I'm  sure  I'd  have  you  herealways 
if  I  could.  But  it  cant  be.  God's  work  must  go  on  from  day 
to  day,  no  matter  what  comes.  We  must  face  our  trouble 
and  bear  it. 

Knox  [wandering  to  the  window  arm  in  arm  with  her] 
Just  look  at  the  people  in  the  street,  going  up  and  down  as 
if  nothing  had  happened.  It  seems  unnatural,  as  if  they 
all  knew  and  didnt  care. 

Mrs  Knox.  If  they  knew,  Jo,  thered  be  a  crowd  round 
the  house  looking  up  at  us.  You  shouldnt  keep  thinking 
about  it. 

Knox.  I  know  I  shouldnt.  You  have  your  religion, 
Amelia;  and  I'm  sure  I'm  glad  it  comforts  you.  But  it 
doesnt  come  to  me  that  way.  Ive  worked  hard  to  get  a 
position  and  be  respectable.  Ive  turned  many  a  girl  out 
of  the  shop  for  being  half  an  hour  late  at  night;  and  heres 
my  own  daughter  gone  for  a  fortnight  without  word  or 
sign,  except  a  telegram  to  say  shes  not  dead  and  that 
we're  not  to  worry  about  her. 

Mrs  Knox  [suddenly  pointing  to  the  street]    Jo,  look! 

Knox.    Margaret!     With  a  man! 

Mrs  Knox.  Run  down,  Jo,  quick.    Catch  her:  save  her. 

Knox  [lingering]  Shes  shaking  hands  with  him:  shes 
coming  across  to  the  door. 

Mrs  Knox  [energetically]  Do  as  I  tell  you.  Catch  the 
man  before  hes  out  of  sight. 

Knox  rushes  from  the  room.  Mrs  Knox  looks  anxiously 
and  excitedly  from  the  window.  Then  she  throivs  up  the 
sash  and  leans  out.    Margaret  Knox  comes  in,  flustered  and 


Act  II  Fanny's  First  Play  195 

annoyed.  She  is  a  strong,  springy  girl  of  eighteen,  with  large 
nostrils,  an  audacious  chin,  and  a  gaily  resolute  manner, 
even  peremptory  on  occasions  like  the  present,  when  she  is 
annoyed. 

Margaret.    Mother.     Mother. 

Mrs  Knox  draws  in  her  head  and  confronts  her  daughter. 

Mrs  Knox  [sternly]    Well,  miss? 

Margaret.  Oh,  mother,  do  go  out  and  stop  father  mak- 
ing a  scene  in  the  street.  He  rushed  at  him  and  said 
"Youre  the  man  who  took  away  my  daughter"  loud 
enough  for  all  the  people  to  hear.  Everybody  stopped. 
We  shall  have  a  crowd  round  the  house.  Do  do  some- 
thing to  stop  him. 

Knox  returns  toith  a  good-looking  young  marine  officer. 

Margaret.  Oh,  Monsieur  Duvallet,  I'm  so  sorry — so 
ashamed.  Mother:  this  is  Monsieur  Duvallet,  who  has 
been  extremely  kind  to  me.  Monsieur  Duvallet:  my 
mother.     [Duvallet  bows]. 

Knox.    A  Frenchman!     It  only  needed  this. 

Margaret  [much  annoyed]  Father:  do  please  be  com- 
monly civil  to  a  gentleman  who  has  been  of  the  greatest 
service  to  me.     What  will  he  think  of  us? 

Duvallet  [debonair]  But  it's  very  natural.  I  under- 
stand Mr  Knox's  feelings  perfectly.  [He  speaks  English 
better  than  Knox,  having  learnt  it  on  both  .sides  of  tlie  Atlantic]. 

Knox.  If  Ive  made  any  mistake  I'm  ready  to  apolo- 
gize. But  I  want  to  know  where  my  daughter  has  been 
for  the  last  fortnight. 

Duvallet.  She  has  been,  I  assure  you,  in  a  particu- 
larly safe  place. 

Knox.  Will  you  tell  me  what  place?  I  can  judge  for 
myself  how  safe  it  was. 

Margaret.    Holloway  Gaol.     Was  that  safe  enough? 

Knox  and  Mrs  Knox.    Holloway  Gaol! 

Knox.    Youve  joined  the  Suffragets! 

Margaret.    No.     I  wish  I  had.     I  could  have  had  the 


196  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  II 

same  experience  in  better  company.  Please  sit  down, 
Monsieur  Duvallet.  [She  sits  between  the  table  and  the 
sofa.  Mrs  Knox,  overwhelmed,  sits  at  the  other  side  of  the 
table.    Knox  remains  standing  in  the  middle  of  the  room], 

Duvallet  [sitting  down  on  the  sofa]  It  was  nothing.  An 
adventure.     Nothing. 

Margaret  [obdurately]  Drunk  and  assaulting  the 
police!     Forty  shillings  or  a  month! 

Mrs  Knox.  Margaret!  Who  accused  you  of  such  a 
thing? 

Margaret.    The  policeman  I  assaulted. 

Knox.    You  mean  to  say  that  you  did  it! 

Margaret.  I  did.  I  had  that  satisfaction  at  all  events. 
I  knocked  two  of  his  teeth  out. 

Knox.    And  you  sit  there  coolly  and  tell  me  this! 

Margaret.  Well,  where  do  you  want  me  to  sit?  Whats 
the  use  of  saying  things  like  that? 

Knox.    My  daughter  in  Holloway  Gaol! 

Margaret.  All  the  women  in  Holloway  are  some- 
body's daughters.  Really,  father,  you  must  make  up 
your  mind  to  it.  If  you  had  sat  in  that  cell  for  fourteen 
days  making  up  your  mind  to  it,  you  would  understand 
that  I'm  not  in  the  humor  to  be  gaped  at  while  youre  try- 
ing to  persuade  yourself  that  it  cant  be  real.  These  things 
really  do  happen  to  real  people  every  day;  and  you  read 
about  them  in  the  papers  and  think  it's  all  right.  Well, 
theyve  happened  to  me:  thats  all. 

Knox  [feeble-forcible]  But  they  shouldnt  have  hap- 
pened to  you.     Dont  you  know  that? 

Margaret.  They  shouldnt  happen  to  anybody,  I  sup- 
pose. But  they  do.  [Rising  impatiently]  And  really  I'd 
rather  go  out  and  assault  another  policeman  and  go  back 
to  Holloway  than  keep  talking  round  and  round  it  like 
this.  If  youre  going  to  turn  me  out  of  the  house,  turn  me 
out:  the  sooner  I  go  the  better. 

Duvallet  [rising  quickly]    That  is  impossible,  mademoi- 


Act  II  Fanny's  First  Play  197 

selle.  Your  father  has  his  position  to  consider.  To  turn 
his  daughter  out  of  doors  would  ruin  him  socially. 

Knox.  Oh,  youve  put  her  up  to  that,  have  you?  And 
where  did  you  come  in,  may  I  ask? 

Duvallet.  I  came  in  at  your  invitation — at  your 
amiable  insistence,  in  fact,  not  at  my  own.  But  you  need 
have  no  anxiety  on  my  account.  I  was  concerned  in  the 
regrettable  incident  which  led  to  your  daughter's  incarcera- 
tion. I  got  a  fortnight  without  the  option  of  a  fine  on  the 
ridiculous  ground  that  I  ought  to  have  struck  the  police- 
man with  my  fist.  I  should  have  done  so  with  pleasure  had 
I  known;  but,  as  it  was,  I  struck  him  on  the  ear  with  my 
boot — a  magnificent  moulinet,  I  must  say — and  was  in- 
formed that  I  had  been  guilty  of  an  act  of  cowardice,  but 
that  for  the  sake  of  the  entente  cordiale  I  should  be  dealt 
with  leniently.  Yet  Miss  Knox,  who  used  her  fist,  got  a 
month,  but  with  the  option  of  a  fine.  I  did  not  know  this 
until  I  was  released,  when  my  first  act  was  to  pay  the  fine. 
And  here  we  are. 

Mrs  Knox.    You  ought  to  pay  the  gentleman  the  fine,  Jo. 

Knox  [reddening]  Oh,  certainly.  [He  takes  out  some 
money}. 

Duvallet.  Oh  please!  it  does  not  matter.  [Knox 
hands  him  two  sovereigns}.  If  you  [insist — [he  pockets  them] 
Thank  you. 

Margaret.  I'm  ever  so  much  obliged  to  you,  Monsieur 
Duvallet. 

Duvallet.  Can  I  be  of  any  further  assistance,  made- 
moiselle? 

Margaret.  I  think  you  had  better  leave  us  to  fight  it 
out,  if  you  dont  mind. 

Duvallet.  Perfectly.  Madame  [bow] — Mademoiselle 
[bow] — Monsieur  [bote] — [He  goes  out]. 

Mrs  Knox.  Dont  ring,  Jo.  See  the  gentleman  out 
yourself. 

Knox  hastily  sees  Duvallet  out.     Mother  and  daughter  sit 


198  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  II 

looking  forlornly  at  one  another  without  saying  a  word.  Mrs 
Knox  slowly  sits  doion.  Margaret  follows  her  example. 
They  look  at  one  another  again.     Mr  Knox  returns. 

Knox  [shortly  and  sternly]  Amelia:  this  is  your  job. 
[To  Margaret]  I  leave  you  to  your  mother.  I  shall  have 
my  own  say  in  the  matter  when  I  hear  what  you  have  to 
say  to  her.     [He  goes  out,  solemn  and  offended], 

Margaret  [with  a  bitter  little  laugh]  Just  what  the 
Suffraget  said  to  me  in  Holloway.  He  throws  the  job  on 
you. 

Mrs  Knox  [reproachfully]    Margaret! 

Margaret.    You  know  it's  true. 

Mrs  Knox.  Margaret:  if  youre  going  to  be  hardened 
about  it,  theres  no  use  my  saying  anything. 

Margaret.  I'm  not  hardened,  mother.  But  I  cant  talk 
nonsense  about  it.  You  see,  it's  all  real  to  me.  Ive  suf- 
fered it.  Ive  been  shoved  and  bullied.  Ive  had  my  arms 
twisted.  Ive  been  made  scream  with  pain  in  other  ways. 
Ive  been  flung  into  a  filthy  cell  with  a  lot  of  other  poor 
wretches  as  if  I  were  a  sack  of  coals  being  emptied  into  a 
cellar.  And  the  only  difference  between  me  and  the  others 
was  that  I  hit  back.  Yes  I  did.  And  I  did  worse.  I 
wasnt  ladylike.  I  cursed.  I  called  names.  I  heard  words 
that  I  didnt  even  know  that  I  knew,  coming  out  of  my 
mouth  just  as  if  somebody  else  had  spoken  them.  The 
policeman  repeated  them  in  court.  The  magistrate  said 
he  could  hardly  believe  it.  The  policeman  held  out  his 
hand  with  his  two  teeth  in  it  that  I  knocked  out.  I  said 
it  was  all  right;  that  I  had  heard  myself  using  those  words 
quite  distinctly;  and  that  I  had  taken  the  good  conduct 
prize  for  three  years  running  at  school.  The  poor  old 
gentleman  put  me  back  for  the  missionary  to  find  out  who 
I  was,  and  to  ascertain  the  state  of  my  mind.  I  wouldnt 
tell,  of  course,  for  your  sakes  at  home  here;  and  I  wouldnt 
say  I  was  sorry,  or  apologize  to  the  policeman,  or  com- 
pensate him  or  anything  of  that  sort.     I  wasnt  sorry. 


Act  II  Fanny's  First  Play  199 

The  one  thing  that  gave  me  any  satisfaction  was  getting 
in  that  smack  on  his  mouth;  and  I  said  so.  So  the  mis- 
sionary reported  that  I  seemed  hardened  and  that  no 
doubt  I  would  tell  who  I  was  after  a  day  in  prison.  Then 
I  was  sentenced.  So  now  you  see  I'm  not  a  bit  the  sort  of 
girl  you  thought  me.  I'm  not  a  bit  the  sort  of  girl  I 
thought  myself.  And  I  dont  know  what  sort  of  person  you 
really  are,  or  what  sort  of  person  father  really  is.  I 
wonder  what  he  would  say  or  do  if  he  had  an  angry  brute 
of  a  policeman  twisting  his  arm  with  one  hand  and  rush- 
ing him  along  by  the  nape  of  his  neck  with  the  other.  He 
couldnt  whirl  his  leg  like  a  windmill  and  knock  a  police- 
man down  by  a  glorious  kick  on  the  helmet.  Oh,  if  theyd 
all  fought  as  we  two  fought  we'd  have  beaten  them. 

Mrs  Knox.    But  how  did  it  all  begin? 

Margaret.  Oh,  I  dont  know.  It  was  boat-race  night, 
they  said. 

Mrs  Knox.  Boat-race  night!  But  what  had  you  to  do 
with  the  boat  race?  You  went  to  the  great  Salvation 
Festival  at  the  Albert  Hall  with  your  aunt.  She  put  you 
into  the  bus  that  passes  the  door.  What  made  you  get 
out  of  the  bus? 

Margaret.  I  dont  know.  The  meeting  got  on  my 
nerves,  somehow.  It  was  the  singing,  I  suppose:  you 
know  I  love  singing  a  good  swinging  hymn;  and  I  felt  it 
was  ridiculous  to  go  home  in  the  bus  after  we  had  been 
singing  so  wonderfully  about  climbing  up  the  golden  stairs 
to  heaven.  I  wanted  more  music — more  happiness — 
more  life.  I  wanted  some  comrade  who  felt  as  I  did.  I 
felt  exalted:  it  seemed  mean  to  be  afraid  of  anything: 
after  all,  what  could  anyone  do  to  me  against  my  will?  I 
suppose  I  was  a  little  mad:  at  all  events,  I  got  out  of  the 
bus  at  Piccadilly  Circus,  because  there  was  a  lot  of  light 
and  excitement  there.  I  walked  to  Leicester  Square;  and 
went  into  a  great  theatre. 

Mrs  Knox  [horrified]    A  theatre! 


200  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  II 

Margaret.  Yes.  Lots  of  other  women  were  going  in 
alone.     I  had  to  pay  five  shillings. 

Mrs  Knox  [aghast]    Five  shillings! 

Margaret  [apologetically]  It  was  a  lot.  It  was  very- 
stuffy;  and  I  didnt  like  the  people  much,  because  they 
didnt  seem  to  be  enjoying  themselves;  but  the  stage  was 
splendid  and  the  music  lovely.  I  saw  that  Frenchman, 
Monsieur  Duvallet,  standing  against  a  barrier,  smoking 
a  cigarette.  He  seemed  quite  happy;  and  he  was  nice 
and  sailorlike.  I  went  and  stood  beside  him,  hoping  he 
would  speak  to  me. 

Mrs  Knox  [gasps]    Margaret! 

Margaret  [continuing]  He  did,  just  as  if  he  had  known 
me  for  years.  We  got  on  together  like  old  friends.  He 
asked  me  would  I  have  some  champagne;  and  I  said  it 
would  cost  too  much,  but  that  I  would  give  anything  for 
a  dance.  I  longed  to  join  the  people  on  the  stage  and 
dance  with  them:  one  of  them  was  the  most  beautiful 
dancer  I  ever  saw.  He  told  me  he  had  come  there  to  see 
her,  and  that  when  it  was  over  we  could  go  somewhere 
where  there  was  dancing.  So  we  went  to  a  place  where 
there  was  a  band  in  a  gallery  and  the  floor  cleared  for 
dancing.  Very  few  people  danced :  the  women  only  wanted 
to  shew  off  their  dresses;  but  we  danced  and  danced  until 
a  lot  of  them  joined  in.  We  got  quite  reckless;  and  we  had 
champagne  after  all.  I  never  enjoyed  anything  so  much. 
But  at  last  it  got  spoilt  by  the  Oxford  and  Cambridge 
students  up  for  the  boat  race.  They  got  drunk;  and  they 
began  to  smash  things;  and  the  police  came  in.  Then  it 
was  quite  horrible.  The  students  fought  with  the  police; 
and  the  police  suddenly  got  quite  brutal,  and  began  to 
throw  everybody  downstairs.  They  attacked  the  women, 
who  were  not  doing  anything,  and  treated  them  just  as 
roughly  as  they  had  treated  the  students.  Duvallet  got 
indignant  and  remonstrated  with  a  policeman,  who  was 
shoving  a  woman  though  she  was  going  quietly  as  fast  as 


Act  II  Fanny's  First  Play  201 

she  could.  The  policeman  flung  the  woman  through  the 
door  and  then  turned  on  Duvallet.  It  was  then  that 
Duvallet  swung  his  leg  like  a  windmill  and  knocked  the 
policeman  down.  And  then  three  policemen  rushed  at 
him  and  carried  him  out  by  the  arms  and  legs  face  down- 
wards. Two  more  attacked  me  and  gave  me  a  shove  to 
the  door.  That  quite  maddened  me.  I  just  got  in  one 
good  bang  on  the  mouth  of  one  of  them.  All  the  rest  was 
dreadful.  I  was  rushed  through  the  streets  to  the  police 
station.  They  kicked  me  with  their  knees;  they  twisted 
my  arms;  they  taunted  and  insulted  me;  they  called  me 
vile  names;  and  I  told  them  what  I  thought  of  them,  and 
provoked  them  to  do  their  worst.  Theres  one  good  thing 
about  being  hard  hurt:  it  makes  you  sleep.  I  slept  in 
that  filthy  cell  with  all  the  other  drunks  sounder  than  I 
should  have  slept  at  home.  I  cant  describe  how  I  felt  next 
morning:  it  was  hideous;  but  the  police  were  quite  jolly; 
and  everybody  said  it  was  a  bit  of  English  fun,  and  talked 
about  last  year's  boat-race  night  when  it  had  been  a  great 
deal  worse.  I  was  black  and  blue  and  sick  and  wretched. 
But  the  strange  thing  was  that  I  wasnt  sorry;  and  I'm  not 
sorry.  And  I  dont  feel  that  I  did  anything  wrong,  really. 
[She  rises  and  stretches  her  arms  with  a  large  liberating 
breath]  Now  that  it's  all  over  I'm  rather  proud  of  it; 
though  I  know  now  that  I'm  not  a  lady;  but  whether  thats 
because  we're  only  shopkeepers,  or  because  nobody's 
really  a  lady  except  when  theyre  treated  like  ladies,  I 
dont  know.     [She  throws  herself  into  a  corner  of  the  sofa]. 

Mrs  Knox  [lost  in  wonder]  But  how  could  you  bring 
yourself  to  do  it,  Margaret?  I'm  not  blaming  you:  I  only 
want  to  know.     How  could  you  bring  yourself  to  do  it? 

Margaret.  I  cant  tell  you.  I  dont  understand  it  my- 
self. The  prayer  meeting  set  me  free,  somehow.  I  should 
never  have  done  it  if  it  were  not  for  the  prayer  meeting. 

Mrs  Knox  [deeply  horrified]  Oh,  dont  say  such  a  thing 
as  that.     I  know  that  prayer  can  set  us  free;  though  you 


202  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  II 

could  never  understand  me  when  I  told  you  so;  but  it  sets 
us  free  for  good,  not  for  evil. 

Margaret.  Then  I  suppose  what  I  did  was  not  evil; 
or  else  I  was  set  free  for  evil  as  well  as  good.  As  father 
says,  you  cant  have  anything  both  ways  at  once.  When 
I  was  at  home  and  at  school  I  was  what  you  call  good; 
but  I  wasnt  free.  And  when  I  got  free  I  was  what  most 
people  would  call  not  good.  But  I  see  no  harm  in  what 
I  did;  though  I  see  plenty  in  what  other  people  did  to 
me. 

Mrs  Knox.  I  hope  you  dont  think  yourself  a  heroine 
of  romance. 

Margaret.  Oh  no.  [She  sits  down  again  at  the  table]. 
I'm  a  heroine  of  reality,  if  you  call  me  a  heroine  at  all. 
And  reality  is  pretty  brutal,  pretty  filthy,  when  you  come 
to  grips  with  it.  Yet  it's  glorious  all  the  same.  It's  so 
real  and  satisfactory. 

Mrs  Knox.  I  dont  like  this  spirit  in  you,  Margaret.  I 
dont  like  your  talking  to  me  in  that  tone. 

Margaret.  It's  no  use,  mother.  I  dont  care  for  you 
and  Papa  any  the  less;  but  I  shall  never  get  back  to  the  old 
way  of  talking  again.    Ive  made  a  sort  of  descent  into  hell — 

Mrs  Knox.    Margaret!    Such  a  word! 

Margaret.  You  should  have  heard  all  the  words  that 
were  flying  round  that  night.  You  should  mix  a  little 
with  people  who  dont  know  any  other  words.  But  when 
I  said  that  about  a  descent  into  hell  I  was  not  swearing. 
I  was  in  earnest,  like  a  preacher. 

Mrs  Knox.  A  preacher  utters  them  in  a  reverent  tone 
of  voice. 

Margaret.  I  know:  the  tone  that  shews  they  dont 
mean  anything  real  to  him.  They  usent  to  mean  anything 
real  to  me.  Now  hell  is  as  real  to  me  as  a  turnip;  and  I 
suppose  I  shall  always  speak  of  it  like  that.  Anyhow, 
Ive  been  there;  and  it  seems  to  me  now  that  nothing  is 
worth  doing  but  redeeming  people  from  it. 


Act  II  Fanny's  First  Play  203 

Mrs  Knox.  They  are  redeemed  already  if  they  choose 
to  believe  it. 

Margaret.  Whats  the  use  of  that  if  they  dont  choose 
to  believe  it?  You  dont  believe  it  yourself,  or  you  wouldnt 
pay  policemen  to  twist  their  arms.  Whats  the  good  of 
pretending?  Thats  all  our  respectability  is,  pretending, 
pretending,  pretending.  Thank  heaven  Ive  had  it  knocked 
out  of  me  once  for  all! 

Mrs  Knox  [greatly  agitated]  Margaret:  dont  talk  like 
that.  I  cant  bear  to  hear  you  talking  wickedly.  I  can 
bear  to  hear  the  children  of  this  world  talking  vainly  and 
foolishly  in  the  language  of  this  world.  But  when  I  hear 
you  justifying  your  wickedness  in  the  words  of  grace,  it's 
too  horrible:  it  sounds  like  the  devil  making  fun  of  reli- 
gion. Ive  tried  to  bring  you  up  to  learn  the  happiness  of 
religion.  Ive  waited  for  you  to  find  out  that  happiness  is 
within  ourselves  and  doesnt  come  from  outward  pleasures. 
Ive  prayed  oftener  than  you  think  that  you  might  be  en- 
lightened. But  if  all  my  hopes  and  all  my  prayers  are  to 
come  to  this,  that  you  mix  up  my  very  words  and  thoughts 
with  the  promptings  of  the  devil,  then  I  dont  know  what  I 
shall  do:  I  dont  indeed:  itll  kill  me. 

Margaret.  You  shouldnt  have  prayed  for  me  to  be 
enlightened  if  you  didnt  want  me  to  be  enlightened.  If 
the  truth  were  known,  I  suspect  we  all  want  our  prayers 
to  be  answered  only  by  halves :  the  agreeable  halves.  Your 
prayer  didnt  get  answered  by  halves,  mother.  Youve  got 
more  than  you  bargained  for  in  the  way  of  enlightenment. 
I  shall  never  be  the  same  again.  I  shall  never  speak  in  the 
old  way  again.  Ive  been  set  free  from  this  silly  little  hole 
of  a  house  and  all  its  pretences.  I  know  now  that  I  am 
stronger  than  you  and  Papa.  I  havnt  found  that  happi- 
ness of  yours  that  is  within  yourself;  but  Ive  found 
strength.  For  good  or  evil  I  am  set  free;  and  none  of  the 
things  that  used  to  hold  me  can  hold  me  now. 

Knox  comes  back,  unable  to  bear  his  suspense. 


204  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  II 

Knox.  How  long  more  are  you  going  to  keep  me  wait- 
ing, Amelia?  Do  you  think  I'm  made  of  iron?  Whats  the 
girl  done?     What  are  we  going  to  do? 

Mbs  Knox.  Shes  beyond  my  control,  Jo,  and  beyond 
yours.  I  cant  even  pray  for  her  now;  for  I  dont  know 
rightly  what  to  pray  for. 

Knox.  Dont  talk  nonsense,  woman:  is  this  a  time  for 
praying?  Does  anybody  know?  Thats  what  we  have 
to  consider  now.  If  only  we  can  keep  it  dark,  I  don't 
care  for  anything  else. 

Margaket.  Dont  hope  for  that,  father.  Mind :  I'll  tell 
everybody.     It  ought  to  be  told.     It  must  be  told. 

Knox.  Hold  your  tongue,  you  young  hussy;  or  go  out 
of  my  house  this  instant. 

Margaret.  I'm  quite  ready.  [She  takes  her  hat  and 
turns  to  the  door]. 

Knox  [throwing  himself  in  front  of  it]  Here!  where  are 
you  going? 

Mrs  Knox  [rising]  You  mustnt  turn  her  out,  Jo!  I'll 
go  with  her  if  she  goes. 

Knox.  Who  wants  to  turn  her  out?  But  is  she  going  to 
ruin  us?  To  let  everybody  know  of  her  disgrace  and 
shame?  To  tear  me  down  from  the  position  Ive  made  for 
myself  and  you  by  forty  years  hard  struggling? 

Margaret.  Yes:  I'm  going  to  tear  it  all  down.  It 
stands  between  us  and  everything.     I'll  tell  everybody. 

Knox.  Magsy,  my  child:  dont  bring  down  your  father's 
hairs  with  sorrow  to  the  grave.  Theres  only  one  thing  I 
care  about  in  the  world:  to  keep  this  dark.  I'm  your 
father.  I  ask  you  here  on  my  knees — in  the  dust,  so  to 
speak — not  to  let  it  out. 

Margaret.    I'll  tell  everybody. 

Knox  collapses  in  despair.  Mrs  Knox  tries  to  pray  and 
cannot.     Margaret  stands  inflexible. 


ACT  III 

Again  in  the  Gilbeys'  dining-room.  Afternoon.  The  table 
is  not  laid:  it  is  draped  in  its  ordinary  cloth,  with  pen  and 
ink,  an  exercise-book,  and  school-books  on  it.  Bobby  Oilbey 
is  in  the  arm-chair,  crouching  over  the  fire,  reading  an  illus- 
trated paper.  He  is  a  pretty  youth,  of  very  suburban  gentility, 
strong  and  manly  enough  by  nature,  but  untrained  and  unsat- 
isfactory, his  parents  having  imagined  that  domestic  restric- 
tion is  what  they  call  "bri?iging  up."  He  has  learnt  nothing 
from  it  except  a  habit  of  evading  it  by  deceit. 

He  gets  up  to  ring  the  bell;  then  resumes  his  crouch.  Juggins 
answers  the  bell. 

Bobby.    Juggins. 

Juggins.    Sir? 

Bobby  [morosely  sarcastic]    Sir  be  blowed! 

Juggins  [cheerfully]    Not  at  all,  sir. 

Bobby.    I'm  a  gaol-bird:  youre  a  respectable  man. 

Juggins.  That  doesnt  matter,  sir.  Your  father  pays 
me  to  call  you  sir;  and  as  I  take  the  money,  I  keep  my 
part  of  the  bargain. 

Bobby.  Would  you  call  me  sir  if  you  wernt  paid  to  do 
it? 

Juggins.    No,  sir. 

Bobby.    Ive  been  talking  to  Dora  about  you. 

Juggins.    Indeed,  sir? 

Bobby.    Yes.     Dora  says  your  name  cant  be  Juggins, 

205 


206  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

and  that  you  have  the  manners  of  a  gentleman.  I  always 
thought  you  hadnt  any  manners.  Anyhow,  your  manners 
are  different  from  the  manners  of  a  gentleman  in  my  set. 

Juggins.    They  would  be,  sir. 

Bobby.  You  dont  feel  disposed  to  be  communicative 
on  the  subject  of  Dora's  notion,  I  suppose. 

Juggins.    No,  sir. 

Bobby  [throioing  his  paper  on  the  floor  and  lifting  kis  knees 
over  the  arm  of  the  chair  so  as  to  turn  towards  the  footman] 
It  was  part  of  your  bargain  that  you  were  to  valet  me  a 
bit,  wasnt  it? 

Juggins.    Yes,  sir. 

Bobby.  Well,  can  you  tell  me  the  proper  way  to  get  out 
of  an  engagement  to  a  girl  without  getting  into  a  row  for 
breach  of  promise  or  behaving  like  a  regular  cad? 

Juggins.  No,  sir.  You  cant  get  out  of  an  engagement 
without  behaving  like  a  cad  if  the  lady  wishes  to  hold  you 
to  it. 

Bobby.  But  it  wouldnt  be  for  her  happiness  to  marry 
me  when  I  dont  really  care  for  her. 

Juggins.  Women  dont  always  marry  for  happiness,  sir. 
They  often  marry  because  they  wish  to  be  married  women 
and  not  old  maids. 

Bobby.    Then  what  am  I  to  do? 

Juggins.    Marry  her,  sir,  or  behave  like  a  cad. 

Bobby  [jumping  up]  Well,  I  wont  marry  her:  thats  flat. 
What -would  you  do  if  you  were  in  my  place? 

Juggins.  I  should  tell  the  young  lady  that  I  found  I 
couldnt  fulfil  my  engagement. 

Bobby.  But  youd  have  to  make  some  excuse,  you  know. 
I  want  to  give  it  a  gentlemanly  turn:  to  say  I'm  not 
worthy  of  her,  or  something  like  that. 

Juggins.  That  is  not  a  gentlemanly  turn,  sir.  Quite 
the  contrary. 

Bobby.  I  dont  see  that  at  all.  Do  you  mean  that  it's 
not  exactly  true? 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  207 

Juggins.    Not  at  all,  sir. 

Bobby.  lean  say  that  no  other  girl  can  ever  be  to  me 
what  shes  been.  That  would  be  quite  true,  because  our 
circumstances  have  been  rather  exceptional;  and  she'll 
imagine  I  mean  I'm  fonder  of  her  than  I  can  ever  be  of 
anyone  else.  You  see,  Juggins,  a  gentleman  has  to  think 
of  a  girl's  feelings. 

Juggins.  If  you  wish  to  spare  her  feelings,  sir,  you  can 
marry  her.  If  you  hurt  her  feelings  by  refusing,  you  had 
better  not  try  to  get  credit  for  considerateness  at  the  same 
time  by  pretending  to  spare  them.  She  wont  like  it.  And 
it  will  start  an  argument,  of  which  you  will  get  the  worse. 

Bobby.    But,  you  know,  I'm  not  really  worthy  of  her. 

Juggins.    Probably  she  never  supposed  you  were,  sir. 

Bobby.    Oh,  I  say,  Juggins,  you  are  a  pessimist. 

Juggins  [preparing  to  go]    Anything  else,  sir? 

Bobby  [querulously]  You  havnt  been  much  use.  [He 
wanders  disconsolately  across  the  room].  You  generally  put 
me  up  to  the  correct  way  of  doing  things. 

Juggins.  I  assure  you,  sir,  theres  no  correct  way  of 
jilting.     It's  not  correct  in  itself. 

Bobby  [hopefully]  I'll  tell  you  what.  I'll  say  I  cant 
hold  her  to  an  engagement  with  a  man  whos  been  in  quod. 
Thatll  do  it.  [He  seats  himself  on  the  table,  relieved  and 
confident]. 

Juggins.  Very  dangerous,  sir.  No  woman  will  deny 
herself  the  romantic  luxury  of  self-sacrifice  and  forgiveness 
when  they  take  the  form  of  doing  something  agreeable. 
Shes  almost  sure  to  say  that  your  misfortune  will  draw 
her  closer  to  you. 

Bobby.  What  a  nuisance!  I  dont  know  what  to  do. 
You  know,  Juggins,  your  cool  simple-minded  way  of  doing 
it  wouldnt  go  down  in  Denmark  Hill. 

Juggins.  I  daresay  not,  sir.  No  doubt  youd  prefer  to 
make  it  look  like  an  act  of  self-sacrifice  for  her  sake  on 
your  part,  or  provoke  her  to  break  the  engagement  her- 


208  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

self.  Both  plans  have  been  tried  repeatedly,  but  never 
with  success,  as  far  as  my  knowledge  goes. 

Bobby.  You  have  a  devilish  cool  way  of  laying  down 
the  law.  You  know,  in  my  class  you  have  to  wrap  up 
things  a  bit.     Denmark  Hill  isn't  Camberwell,  you  know. 

Juggins.  I  have  noticed,  sir,  that  Denmark  Hill  thinks 
that  the  higher  you  go  in  the  social  scale,  the  less  sincerity 
is  allowed,  and  that  only  tramps  and  riff-raff  are  quite 
sincere.  Thats  a  mistake.  Tramps  are  often  shameless; 
but  theyre  never  sincere.  Swells — if  I  may  use  that  con- 
venient name  for  the  upper  classes — play  much  more  with 
their  cards  on  the  table.  If  you  tell  the  young  lady  that 
you  want  to  jilt  her,  and  she  calls  you  a  pig,  the  tone  of 
the  transaction  may  leave  much  to  be  desired;  but  itll  be 
less  Camberwellian  than  if  you  say  youre  not  worthy. 

Bobby.  Oh,  I  cant  make  you  understand,  Juggins.  The 
girl  isnt  a  scullery-maid.    I  want  to  do  it  delicately. 

Juggins.  A  mistake,  sir,  believe  me,  if  you  are  not  a 
born  artist  in  that  line. — Beg  pardon,  sir,  I  think  I  heard 
the  bell.     [He  goes  out]. 

Bobby,  much  perplexed,  shoves  his  hands  into  his  pockets, 
and  comes  off  the  table,  staring  disconsolately  straight  before 
him;  then  goes  reluctantly  to  his  books,  and  sits  down  to  write. 
Juggins  returns. 

Juggins  [announcing]    Miss  Knox. 

Margaret  comes  in.    Juggins  withdraws. 

Margaret.  Still  grinding  away  for  that  Society  of  Arts 
examination,  Bobby?     Youll  never  pass. 

Bobby  [rising]    No:  I  was  just  writing  to  you. 

Margaret.    What  about? 

Bobby.    Oh,  nothing.     At  least —    How  are  you? 

Margaret  [passing  round  the  other  end  of  the  table  and 
putting  down  on  it  a  copy  of  Lloyd's  Weekly  and  her  purse- 
bag]    Quite  well,  thank  you.    How  did  you  enjoy  Brighton? 

Bobby.  Brighton!  I  wasnt  at —  Oh  yes,  of  course. 
Oh,  pretty  well.    Is  your  aunt  all  right? 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  209 

Margaret.  My  aunt!  I  suppose  so.  I  ha  vent  seen  her 
for  a  month. 

Bobby.    I  thought  you  were  down  staying  with  her. 

Margaret.    Oh!  was  that  what  they  told  you? 

Bobby.    Yes.     Why?  Werent  you  really? 

Margaret.  No.  Ive  something  to  tell  you.  Sit  down 
and  lets  be  comfortable. 

She  sits  on  the  edge  of  the  table.  He  sits  beside  her,  and 
puts  his  arm  wearily  round  her  waist. 

Margaret.  You  neednt  do  that  if  you  dont  like, 
Bobby.  Suppose  we  get  off  duty  for  the  day,  just  to  see 
what  it's  like. 

Bobby.   Off  duty?    What  do  you  mean? 

Margaret.  You  know  very  well  what  I  mean.  Bobby: 
did  you  ever  care  one  little  scrap  for  me  in  that  sort  of 
way?  Dont  funk  answering:  I  dont  care  a  bit  for  you — 
that  way. 

Bobby  [removing  his  arm  rather  huffily]  I  beg  your  par- 
don, I'm  sure.     I  thought  you  did. 

Margaret.  Well,  did  you?  Come!  Dont  be  mean. 
Ive  owned  up.  You  can  put  it  all  on  me  if  you  like;  but 
I  dont  believe  you  care  any  more  than  I  do. 

Bobby.  You  mean  weve  been  shoved  into  it  rather  by 
the  pars  and  mars. 

Margaret.    Yes. 

Bobby.  Well,  it's  not  that  I  dont  care  for  you:  in  fact, 
no  girl  can  ever  be  to  me  exactly  what  you  are;  but  weve 
been  brought  up  so  much  together  that  it  feels  more  like 
brother  and  sister  than — well,  than  the  other  thing,  doesnt 
it? 

Margaret.  Just  so.  How  did  you  find  out  the 
difference? 

Bobby  [blushing]   Oh,  I  say! 

Margaret.    I  found  out  from  a  Frenchman. 

Bobby.  Oh,  I  say!  [He  comes  off  the  table  in  his 
consternation]. 


210  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Maegaeet.  Did  you  learn  it  from  a  Frenchwoman? 
You  know  you  must  have  learnt  it  from  somebody. 

Bobby.  Not  a  Frenchwoman.  Shes  quite  a  nice  woman. 
But  shes  been  rather  unfortunate.  The  daughter  of  a 
clergyman. 

Maegaeet  [startled]  Oh,  Bobby!  That  sort  of 
woman! 

Bobby.    What  sort  of  woman? 

Maegaeet.  You  dont  believe  shes  really  a  clergyman's 
daughter,  do  you,  you  silly  boy?    It's  a  stock  joke. 

Bobby.    Do  you  mean  to  say  you  dont  believe  me? 

Maegaeet.    No:   I  mean  to  say  I  dont  believe  her. 

Bobby  [curious  and  interested,  resuming  his  seat  on  the 
table  beside  her].  What  do  you  know  about  her?  What  do 
you  know  about  all  this  sort  of  thing? 

Maegaeet.    What  sort  of  thing,  Bobby? 

Bobby.    Well,  about  life. 

Maegaeet.  Ive  lived  a  lot  since  I  saw  you  last.  I 
wasnt  at  my  aunt's.  All  that  time  that  you  were  in 
Brighton,  I  mean. 

Bobby.  I  wasnt  at  Brighton,  Meg.  I'd  better  tell  you: 
youre  bound  to  find  out  sooner  or  later.  [He  begins  his 
confession  humbly,  avoiding  her  gaze].  Meg:  it's  rather 
awful:  youll  think  me  no  end  of  a  beast.  Ive  been  in 
prison. 

Maegaeet.   You  ! 

Bobby.  Yes,  me.  For  being  drunk  and  assaulting  the 
police. 

Maegaeet.  Do  you  mean  to  say  that  you — oh!  this  is 
a  let-down  for  me.  [She  comes  off  the  table  and  drops,  dis- 
consolate, into  a  chair  at  the  end  of  it  furthest  from  the 
hearth]. 

Bobby.  Of  course  I  couldnt  hold  you  to  our  engage- 
ment after  that.  I  was  writing  to  you  to  break  it  off. 
[He  also  descends  from  the  table  and  makes  slowly  for  the 
hearth].     You  must  think  me  an  utter  rotter. 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  211 

Margaret.  Oh,  has  everybody  been  in  prison  for 
being  drunk  and  assaulting  the  police?  How  long  were 
you  in? 

Bobby.    A  fortnight. 

Margaret.    Thats  what  I  was  in  for. 

Bobby.    What  are  you  talking  about?     In  where? 

Margaret.    In  quod. 

Bobby.  But  I'm  serious:  I'm  not  rotting.  Really  and 
truly — 

Margaret.    What  did  you  do  to  the  copper? 

Bobby.  Nothing,  absolutely  nothing.  He  exaggerated 
grossly.     I  only  laughed  at  him. 

Margaret  [jumping  up,  triumphant]  Ive  beaten  you 
hollow.  I  knocked  out  two  of  his  teeth.  Ive  got  one  of 
them.     He  sold  it  to  me  for  ten  shillings. 

Bobby.  Now  please  do  stop  fooling,  Meg.  I  tell  you 
I'm  not  rotting.  [He  sits  down  in  the  armchair,  rather 
sulkily]. 

Margaret  [taking  up  the  copy  of  Lloyd's  Weekly  and 
going  to  him]  And  I  tell  you  I'm  not  either.  Look! 
Heres  a  report  of  it.  The  daily  papers  are  no  good;  but 
the  Sunday  papers  are  splendid.  [She  sits  on  the  arm  of  the 
chair].  See!  [Reading]:  "Hardened  at  Eighteen.  A 
quietly  dressed,  respectable-looking  girl  who  refuses  her 
name" — thats  me. 

Bobby  [pausing  a  moment  in  his  perusal]  Do  you 
mean  to  say  that  you  went  on  the  loose  out  of  pure 
devilment? 

Margaret.  I  did  no  harm.  I  went  to  see  a  lovely 
dance.  I  picked  up  a  nice  man  and  went  to  have  a  dance 
myself.  I  cant  imagine  anything  more  innocent  and  more 
happy.  All  the  bad  part  was  done  by  other  people:  they 
did  it  out  of  pure  devilment  if  you  like.  Anyhow,  here  we 
are,  two  gaolbirds,  Bobby,  disgraced  forever.  Isnt  it  a 
relief? 

Bobby  [rising  stiffly]    But  you  know,  it's  not  the  same 


212  Fanny's  First  Flay  Act  III 

for  a  girl.  A  man  may  do  things  a  woman  maynt.  [He 
stands  on  the  hearthrug  with  his  back  to  the  fire]. 

Margaret.    Are  you  scandalized,  Bobby? 

Bobby.  Well,  you  cant  expect  me  to  approve  of  it,  can 
you,  Meg?     I  never  thought  you  were  that  sort  of  girl. 

Margaret  [rising  indignantly]  I'm  not.  You  mustnt 
pretend  to  think  that  /'m  a  clergyman's  daughter,  Bobby. 

Bobby.  I  wish  you  wouldnt  chaff  about  that.  Dont 
forget  the  row  you  got  into  for  letting  out  that  you  ad- 
mired Juggins  [she  turns  her  back  on  him  quickly] — a  foot- 
man!    And  what  about  the  Frenchman? 

Margaret  [facing  him  again]  I  know  nothing  about  the 
Frenchman  except  that  hes  a  very  nice  fellow  and  can 
swing  his  leg  round  like  the  hand  of  a  clock  and  knock  a 
policeman  down  with  it.  He  was  in  Wormwood  Scrubbs 
with  you.    I  was  in  Holloway. 

Bobby.  It's  all  very  well  to  make  light  of  it,  Meg;  but 
this  is  a  bit  thick,  you  know. 

Margaret.  Do  you  feel  you  couldnt  marry  a  woman 
whos  been  in  prison? 

Bobby  [hastily]  No.  I  never  said  that.  It  might  even 
give  a  woman  a  greater  claim  on  a  man.  Any  girl,  if  she 
were  thoughtless  and  a  bit  on,  perhaps,  might  get  into  a 
scrape.  Anyone  who  really  understood  her  character 
could  see  there  was  no  harm  in  it.  But  youre  not  the 
larky  sort.     At  least  you  usent  to  be. 

Margaret.  I'm  not;  and  I  never  will  be.  [She  walks 
straight  up  to  him].  I  didnt  do  it  for  a  lark,  Bob:  I  did 
it  out  of  the  very  depths  of  my  nature.  I  did  it  because 
I'm  that  sort  of  person.  I  did  it  in  one  of  my  religious  fits. 
I'm  hardened  at  eighteen,  as  they  say.  So  what  about  the 
match,  now? 

Bobby.  Well,  I  dont  think  you  can  fairly  hold  me  to  it, 
Meg.  Of  course  it  would  be  ridiculous  for  me  to  set  up 
to  be  shocked,  or  anything  of  that  sort.  I  cant  afford  to 
throw  stones  at  anybody;    and  I  dont  pretend  to.     I  can 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  213 

understand  a  lark;  I  can  forgive  a  slip;  as  long  as  it  is 
understood  that  it  is  only  a  lark  or  a  slip.  But  to  go  on 
the  loose  on  principle;  to  talk  about  religion  in  connec- 
tion with  it;  to — to — -well,  Meg,  I  do  find  that  a  bit 
thick,  I  must  say.  I  hope  youre  not  in  earnest  when  you 
talk  that  way. 

Margaret.  Bobby:  youre  no  good.  No  good  to  me, 
anyhow. 

Bobby  [huffed]    I'm  sorry,  Miss  Knox. 

Margaret.  Goodbye,  Mr  Gilbey.  [She  turns  on  her 
heel  and  goes  to  the  other  end  of  the  table].  I  suppose  you 
wont  introduce  me  to  the  clergyman's  daughter. 

Bobby.  I  dont  think  she'd  like  it.  There  are  limits, 
after  all.  [He  sits  down  at  the  table,  as  if  to  resume  work  at 
his  books:   a  hint  to  her  to  go]. 

Margaret  [on  her  way  to  the  door]  Ring  the  bell,  Bobby; 
and  tell  Juggins  to  shew  me  out. 

Bobby  [reddening]    I'm  not  a  cad,  Meg. 

Margaret  [coming  to  the  table]  Then  do  something  nice 
to  prevent  us  feeling  mean  about  this  afterwards.  Youd 
better  kiss  me.     You  neednt  ever  do  it  again. 

Bobby.  If  I'm  no  good,  I  dont  see  what  fun  it  would  be 
for  you. 

Margaret.  Oh,  it'd  be  no  fun.  If  I  wanted  what 
you  call  fun,  I  should  ask  the  Frenchman  to  kiss  me — or 
Juggins. 

Bobby  [rising  and  retreating  to  the  hearth]  Oh,  dont  be 
disgusting,  Meg.     Dont  be  low. 

Margaret  [determinedly,  preparing  to  use  force]  Now,  I'll 
make  you  kiss  me,  just  to  punish  you.  [She  seizes  his  wrist; 
pulls  him  off  his  balance;  and  gets  her  arm  round  his  neck]. 

Bobby.    No.    Stop.    Leave  go,  will  you. 

Juggins  appears  at  the  door. 

Juggins.  Miss  Delaney,  Sir.  [Dora  comes  in.  Juggins 
goes  out.  Margaret  hastily  releases  Bobby,  and  goes  to  the 
other  side  of  the  room. 

i 


214  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Dora  [through  the  door,  to  the  departing  Juggins]  Well, 
you  are  a  Juggins  to  shew  me  up  when  theres  company. 
[To  Margaret  and  Bobby]  It's  all  right,  dear:  all  right,  old 
man:   I'll  wait  in  Juggins's  pantry  til  youre  disengaged. 

Margaret.    Dont  you  know  me? 

Dora  [coming  to  the  middle  of  the  room  and  looking  at  her 
very  attentively]    Why,  it's  never  No.  406! 

Margaret.    Yes  it  is. 

Dora.  Well,  I  should  never  have  known  you  out  of  the 
uniform.  How  did  you  get  out?  You  were  doing  a  month, 
wernt  you? 

Margaret.  My  bloke  paid  the  fine  the  day  he  got  out 
himself. 

Dora.  A  real  gentleman !  [Pointing  to  Bobby,  who  is  star- 
ing open-mouthed]    Look  at  him.    He  cant  take  it  in. 

Bobby.  I  suppose  you  made  her  acquaintance  in  prison, 
Meg.  But  when  it  comes  to  talking  about  blokes  and  all 
that — well ! 

Margaret.  Oh,  Ive  learnt  the  language;  and  I  like  it. 
It's  another  barrier  broken  down. 

Bobby.  It's  not  so  much  the  language,  Meg.  But  I 
think  [fie  looks  at  Dora  and  stops]. 

Margaret  [suddenly  dangerous]  What  do  you  think, 
Bobby? 

Dora.  He  thinks  you  oughtnt  to  be  so  free  with  me, 
dearie.  It  does  him  credit:  he  always  was  a  gentleman, 
you  know. 

Margaret.  Does  him  credit!  To  insult  you  like  that! 
Bobby:   say  that  that  wasnt  what  you  meant. 

Bobby.    I  didnt  say  it  was. 

Margaret.    Well,  deny  that  it  was. 

Bobby.  No.  I  wouldnt  have  said  it  in  front  of  Dora; 
but  I  do  think  it's  not  quite  the  same  thing  my  knowing 
her  and  you  knowing  her. 

Dora.  Of  course  it  isnt,  old  man.  [To  Margaret]  I'll 
just    trot    off    and    come    back   in  half    an    hour.     You 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  215 

two  can  make  it  up  together.  I'm  really  not  fit  company 
for  you,  dearie:  I  couldnt  live  up  to  you.  [She  turns 
to  go]. 

Margaret.  Stop.  Do  you  believe  he  could  live  up  to 
me? 

Dora.  Well,  I'll  never  say  anything  to  stand  between 
a  girl  and  a  respectable  marriage,  or  to  stop  a  decent  lad 
from  settling  himself.  I  have  a  conscience;  though  I 
maynt  be  as  particular  as  some. 

Margaret.  You  seem  to  me  to  be  a  very  decent  sort; 
and  Bobby's  behaving  like  a  skunk. 

Bobby  [much  ruffled]    Nice  language  that! 

Dora.  Well,  dearie,  men  have  to  do  some  awfully  mean 
things  to  keep  up  their  respectability.  But  you  cant  blame 
them  for  that,  can  you?  Ive  met  Bobby  walking  with  his 
mother;  and  of  course  he  cut  me  dead.  I  wont  pret  md  I 
liked  it;   but  what  could  he  do,  poor  dear? 

Margaret.  And  now  he  wants  me  to  cut  you  dead  to 
keep  him  in  countenance.  Well,  I  shant:  not  if  my  whole 
family  were  there.  But  I'll  cut  him  dead  if  he  doesnt  treat 
you  properly.  [To  Bobby,  with  a  threatening  move  in  his 
direction]    I'll  educate  you,  you  young  beast. 

Bobby  [furious,  meeting  her  half  way  ]  Who  are  you  call- 
ing a  young  beast? 

Margaret.    You. 

Dora  [peacemaking]    Now,  dearies! 

Bobby.  If  you  dont  take  care,  youll  get  your  fat  head 
jolly  well  clouted. 

Margaret.  If  you  dont  take  care,  the  policeman's 
tooth  will  only  be  the  beginning  of  a  collection. 

Dora.    Now,  loveys,  be  good. 

Bobby,  lost  to  all  sense  of  adult  dignity,  puts  out  his  tongue 
at  Margaret.  Margaret,  equally  furious,  catches  his  pro- 
tended countenance  a  box  on  the  cheek.  He  hurls  himself 
her.     They  wrestle. 

Bobby.    Cat!     I'll  teach  you. 


216  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Margaret.  Pig!  Beast!  [She  forces  him  backwards  on 
the  table].     Now  where  are  you? 

Dora  [calling]  Juggins,  Juggins.  Theyll  murder  one 
another. 

Juggins  [throwing  [open  the  door,  and  announcing]  Mon- 
sieur Duvallet. 

Duvallet  enters.  Sudden  cessation  of  hostilities,  and  dead 
silence.  The  combatants  separate  by  the  whole  width  of  the 
room.     Juggins  withdraws. 

Duvallet.    I  fear  I  derange  you. 

Margaret.  Not  at  all.  Bobby:  you  really  are  a  beast: 
Monsieur  Duvallet  will  think  I'm  always  fighting. 

Duvallet.  Practising  jujitsu  or  the  new  Iceland 
wrestling.  Admirable,  Miss  Knox.  The  athletic  young 
Englishwoman  is  an  example  to  all  Europe.  [Indicating 
Bobby]    Your  instructor,  no  doubt.    Monsieur — [he  bows]. 

Bobby  [bowing  awkwardly]    How  d'y'  do? 

Margaret  [to  Bobby]  I'm  so  sorry,  Bobby:  I  asked 
Monsieur  Duvallet  to  call  for  me  here;  and  I  forgot  to  tell 
you.  [Introducing]  Monsieur  Duvallet:  Miss  Four  hun- 
dred and  seven.  Mr  Bobby  Gilbey.  [Duvallet  bows].  I 
really  dont  know  how  to  explain  our  relationships.  Bobby 
and  I  are  like  brother  and  sister. 

Duvallet.    Perfectly.     I  noticed  it. 

Margaret.    Bobby  and  Miss —  Miss — 

Dora.  Delaney,  dear.  [To  Duvallet,  bewitchingly] 
Darling  Dora,  to  real  friends. 

Margaret.  Bobby  and  Dora  are —  are —  well,  not 
brother  and  sister. 

Duvallet  [with  redoubled  comprehension]    PERfectly. 

Margaret.  Bobby  has  spent  the  last  fortnight  in 
prison.     You  dont  mind,  do  you? 

Duvallet.  No,  naturally.  I  have  spent  the  last  fort- 
night in  prison. 

The  conversation  drops.    Margaret  renews  it  with  an  effort. 

Margaret.    Dora  has  spent  the  last  fortnight  in  prison. 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  217 

Duvallet.  Quite  so.  I  felicitate  Mademoiselle  on  her 
enlargement. 

Dora.  Trop  merci,  as  they  say  in  Boulogne.  No  call  to 
be  stiff  with  one  another,  have  we? 

Juggins  comes  in. 

Juggins.  Beg  pardon,  sir.  Mr  and  Mrs  Gilbey  are 
coming  up  the  street. 

Dora.    Let  me  absquatulate  [making  for  the  door]. 

Juggins.  If  you  wish  to  leave  without  being  seen,  you 
had  better  step  into  my  pantry  and  leave  afterwards. 

Dora.    Right  oh!   [She  bursts  into  song] 

Hide  me  in  the  meat  safe  til  the  cop  goes  by. 
Hum  the  dear  old  music  as  his  step  draws  nigh. 
[She  goes  out  on  tiptoe]. 

Margaret.  I  wont  stay  here  if  she  has  to  hide.  I'll 
keep  her  company  in  the  pantry.     [She  follows  Dora]. 

Bobby.  Lets  all  go.  We  cant  have  any  fun  with  the 
Mar  here.  I  say,  Juggins:  you  can  give  us  tea  in  the 
pantry,  cant  you? 

Juggins.    Certainly,  sir. 

Bobby.  Right.  Say  nothing  to  my  mother.  You  dont 
mind,  Mr.  Doovalley,  do  you? 

Duvallet.    I  shall  be  charmed. 

Bobby.  Right  you  are.  Come  along.  [At  the  door]  Oh, 
by  the  way,  Juggins,  fetch  down  that  concertina  from 
my  room,  will  you? 

Juggins.  Yes,  sir.  [Bobby  goes  out.  Duvallet  follows  him 
to  the  door].  You  understand,  sir,  that  Miss  Knox  is  a  lady 
absolutely  comme  il  faut? 

Duvallet.    Perfectly.     But  the  other? 

Juggins.  The  other,  sir,  may  be  both  charitably  and 
accurately  described  in  your  native  idiom  as  a  daughter  of 

joy. 

Duvallet.  It  is  what  I  thought.  These  English 
domestic  interiors  are  very  interesting.  [He  goes  out,  fol- 
lowed by  Juggins], 


218  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Presently  Mr  and  Mrs  Gilbey  come  in.  They  take  their 
accustomed  places:  he  on  the  hearthrug,  she  at  the  colder  end 
of  the  table. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Did  you  smell  scent  in  the  hall,  Rob? 

Gilbey.  No,  I  didnt.  And  I  dont  want  to  smell  it. 
Dont  you  go  looking  for  trouble,  Maria. 

Mrs  Gilbey  [snuffing  up  the  perfumed  atmosphere]  Shes 
been  here.  [Gilbey  rings  the  bell].  What  are  you  ringing 
for?    Are  you  going  to  ask? 

Gilbey.  No,  I'm  not  going  to  ask.  Juggins  said  this 
morning  he  wanted  to  speak  to  me.  If  he  likes  to  tell  me, 
let  him;  but  I'm  not  going  to  ask;  and  dont  you  either. 
[Juggins  appears  at  the  door].  You  said  you  wanted  to  say 
something  to  me. 

Juggins.    When  it  would  be  convenient  to  you,  sir. 

Gilbey.    Well,  what  is  it? 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Oh,  Juggins,  we're  expecting  Mr  and  Mrs 
Knox  to  tea. 

Gilbey.  He  knows  that.  [He  sits  down.  Then,  to  Jug- 
gins] What  is  it? 

Juggins  [advancing  to  the  middle  of  the  table]  Would  it 
inconvenience  you,  sir,  if  I  was  to  give  you  a  month's 
notice? 

Gilbey  [taken  aback]   What!  Why?  Aint  you  satisfied? 

Juggins.  Perfectly,  sir.  It  is  not  that  I  want  to  better 
myself,  I  assure  you. 

Gilbey.  Well,  what  do  you  want  to  leave  for,  then? 
Do  you  want  to  worse  yourself? 

Juggins.  No,  sir.  Ive  been  well  treated  in  your  most 
comfortable  establishment;  and  I  should  be  greatly  dis- 
tressed if  you  or  Mrs  Gilbey  were  to  interpret  my  notice 
as  an  expression  of  dissatisfaction. 

Gilbey  [paternally]  Now  you  listen  to  me,  Juggins. 
I'm  an  older  man  than  you.  Dont  you  throw  out  dirty 
water  til  you  get  in  fresh.  Dont  get  too  big  for  your  boots. 
Youre  like  all  servants  nowadays:    you  think  youve  only 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  219 

to  hold  up  your  finger  to  get  the  pick  of  half  a  dozen  jobs. 
But  you  wont  be  treated  everywhere  as  youre  treated 
here.  In  bed  every  night  before  eleven;  hardly  a  ring  at 
the  door  except  on  Mrs  Gilbey's  day  once  a  month;  and 
no  other  manservant  to  interfere  with  you.  It  may  be  a 
bit  quiet  perhaps;  but  youre  past  the  age  of  adventure. 
Take  my  advice:  think  over  it.  You  suit  me;  and  I'm 
prepared  to  make  it  suit  you  if  youre  dissatisfied — in 
reason,  you  know. 

Juggins.  I  realize  my  advantages,  sir;  but  Ive  private 
reasons— 

Gilbey  [cutting  him  short  angrily  and  retiring  to  the 
hearthrug  in  dudgeon]  Oh,  I  know.  Very  well:  go.  The 
sooner  the  better. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Oh,  not  until  we're  suited.  He  must  stay 
his  month. 

Gilbey  [sarcastic]  Do  you  want  to  lose  him  his  charac- 
ter, Maria?  Do  you  think  I  dont  see  what  it  is?  We're 
prison  folk  now.  Weve  been  in  the  police  court.  [To  Jug- 
gins] Well,  I  suppose  you  know  your  own  business  best. 
I  take  your  notice:  you  can  go  when  your  month  is  up,  or 
sooner,  if  you  like. 

Juggins.    Believe  me,  sir — 

Gilbey.  Thats  enough:  I  dont  want  any  excuses.  I 
dont  blame  you.  You  can  go  downstairs  now,  if  youve 
nothing  else  to  trouble  me  about. 

Juggins.  I  really  cant  leave  it  at  that,  sir.  I  assure  you 
Ive  no  objection  to  young  Mr  Gilbey's  going  to  prison. 
You  may  do  six  months  yourself,  sir,  and  welcome,  with- 
out a  word  of  remonstrance  from  me.  I'm  leaving  solely 
because  my  brother,  who  has  suffered  a  bereavement,  and 
feels  lonely,  begs  me  to  spend  a  few  months  with  him 
until  he  gets  over  it. 

Gilbey.  And  is  he  to  keep  you  all  that  time?  or  are 
you  to  spend  your  savings  in  comforting  him?  Have  some 
sense,  man:    how  can  you  afford  such  things? 


220  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Juggins.  My  brother  can  afford  to  keep  me,  sir.  The 
truth  is,  he  objects  to  my  being  in  service. 

Gilbey.  Is  that  any  reason  why  you  should  be  depend- 
ent on  him?  Dont  do  it,  Juggins:  pay  your  own  way  like 
an  honest  lad;  and  dont  eat  your  brother's  bread  while 
youre  able  to  earn  your  own. 

Juggins.  There  is  sound  sense  in  that,  sir.  But  un- 
fortunately it  is  a  tradition  in  my  family  that  the  younger 
brothers  should  spunge  to  a  considerable  extent  on  the 
eldest. 

Gilbey.  Then  the  sooner  that  tradition  is  broken,  the 
better,  my  man. 

Juggins.  A  Radical  sentiment,  sir.  But  an  excellent 
one. 

Gilbey.  Radical!  What  do  you  mean?  Dont  you  begin 
to  take  liberties,  Juggins,  now  that  you  know  we're  loth  to 
part  with  you.     Your  brother  isnt  a  duke,  you  know. 

Juggins.    Unfortunately,  he  is,  sir. 

Gilbey.  \  fWhat! 

Mrs  Gilbey.  /  °^e    er  {  Juggins ! 

Juggins.    Excuse  me,  sir:    the  bell.     [He  goes  out]. 

Gilbey  [overwhelmed]  Maria:  did  you  understand  him 
to  say  his  brother  was  a  duke? 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Fancy  his  condescending!  Perhaps  if 
youd  offer  to  raise  his  wages  and  treat  him  as  one  of  the 
family,  he'd  stay. 

Gilbey.  And  have  my  own  servant  above  me!  Not  me. 
Whats  the  world  coming  to?     Heres  Bobby  and — 

Juggins  [entering  and  announcing]  Mr  and  Mrs  Knox. 

The  Knoxes  come  in.  Juggins  takes  two  chairs  from  the 
wall  and  places  them  at  the  table,  between  the  host  and  hostess. 
Then  he  withdraws. 

Mrs.  Gilbey  [to  Mrs  Knox]    How  are  you,  dear? 

Mrs  Knox.  Nicely,  thank  you.  Good  evening,  Mr 
Gilbey.  [They  shake  hands;  and  she  takes  the  chair  nearest 
Mrs  Gilbey.     Mr  Knox  takes  the  other  chair]. 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  221 

Gilbey  [sitting  down]  I  was  just  saying,  Knox,  What 
is  the  world  coming  to? 

Knox  [appealing  to  his  wife]  What  was  I  saying  myself 
only  this  morning? 

Mrs  Knox.  This  is  a  strange  time.  I  was  never  one  to 
talk  about  the  end  of  the  world;  but  look  at  the  things 
that  have  happened! 

Knox.    Earthquakes! 

Gilbey.    San  Francisco! 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Jamaica! 

Knox.    Martinique! 

Gilbey.    Messina! 

Mrs  Gilbey.    The  plague  in  China! 

Mrs  Knox.    The  floods  in  France! 

Gilbey.    My  Bobby  in  Wormwood  Scrubbs! 

Knox.    Margaret  in  Holloway! 

Gilbey.  And  now  my  footman  tells  me  his  brother's  a 
duke! 

Knox.  1  (No! 

Mrs  Knox.  /  I  Whats  that? 

Gilbey.  Just  before  he  let  you  in.  A  duke!  Here  has 
everything  been  respectable  from  the  beginning  of  the 
world,  as  you  may  say,  to  the  present  day;  and  all  of  a 
sudden  everything  is  turned  upside  down. 

Mrs  Knox.  It's  like  in  the  book  of  Revelations. 
But  I  do  say  that  unless  people  have  happiness 
within  themselves,  all  the  earthquakes,  all  the  floods, 
and  all  the  prisons  in  the  world  cant  make  them  really 
happy. 

Knox.  It  isnt  alone  the  curious  things  that  are  happen- 
ing, but  the  unnatural  way  people  are  taking  them.  Why, 
theres  Margaret  been  in  prison,  and  she  hasnt  time  to  go 
to  all  the  invitations  shes  had  from  people  that  never 
asked  her  before. 

Gilbey.  I  never  knew  we  could  live  without  being 
respectable. 


ZZZ  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Oh,  Rob,  what  a  thing  to  say!  Who  says 
we're  not  respectable? 

Gilbey.  Well,  it's  not  what  I  call  respectable  to  have 
your  children  in  and  out  of  gaol. 

Knox.  Oh  come,  Gilbey!  we're  not  tramps  because 
weve  had,  as  it  were,  an  accident. 

Gilbey.  It's  no  use,  Knox:  look  it  in  the  face.  Did  I 
ever  tell  you  my  father  drank? 

Knox.    No.     But  I  knew  it.     Simmons  told  me. 

Gilbey.  Yes:  he  never  could  keep  his  mouth  quiet:  he 
told  me  your  aunt  was  a  kleptomaniac. 

Mrs  Knox.  It  wasnt  true,  Mr  Gilbey.  She  used  to 
pick  up  handkerchiefs  if  she  saw  them  lying  about;  but 
you  might  trust  her  with  untold  silver. 

Gilbey.  My  Uncle  Phil  was  a  teetotaller.  My  father 
used  to  say  to  me:  Rob,  he  says,  dont  you  ever  have  a 
weakness.  If  you  find  one  getting  a  hold  on  you,  make  a 
merit  of  it,  he  says.  Your  Uncle  Phil  doesnt  like  spirits; 
and  he  makes  a  merit  of  it,  and  is  chairman  of  the  Blue 
Ribbon  Committee.  I  do  like  spirits;  and  I  make  a  merit 
of  it,  and  I'm  the  King  Cockatoo  of  the  Convivial  Cocka- 
toos. Never  put  yourself  in  the  wrong,  he  says.  I  used 
to  boast  about  what  a  good  boy  Bobby  was.  Now  I 
swank  about  what  a  dog  he  is;  and  it  pleases  people  just 
as  well.     What  a  world  it  is! 

Knox.  It  turned  my  blood  cold  at  first  to  hear  Mar- 
garet telling  people  about  Holloway;  but  it  goes  down 
better  than  her  singing  used  to. 

Mrs  Knox.  I  never  thought  she  sang  right  after  all 
those  lessons  we  paid  for. 

Gilbey.  Lord,  Knox,  it  was  lucky  you  and  me  got  let 
in  together.  I  tell  you  straight,  if  it  hadnt  been  for 
Bobby's  disgrace,  I'd  have  broke  up  the  firm. 

Knox.  I  shouldnt  have  blamed  you:  I'd  have  done  the 
same  only  for  Margaret.  Too  much  straightlacedness 
narrows  a  man's  mind.    Talking  of  that,  what  about  those 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  223 

hygienic  corset  advertisements  that  Vines  &  Jackson  want 
us  to  put  in  the  window?  I  told  Vines  they  werent  decent 
and  we  couldnt  shew  them  in  our. shop.  I  was  pretty  high 
with  him.  But  what  am  I  to  say  to  him  now  if  he  comes 
and  throws  this  business  in  our  teeth? 

Gilbey.  Oh,  put  em  in.  We  may  as  well  go  it  a  bit 
now. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Youve  been  going  it  quite  far  enough, 
Rob.  [To  Mrs  Knox]  He  wont  get  up  in  the  mornings  now: 
he  that  was  always  out  of  bed  at  seven  to  the  tick! 

Mrs  Knox.  You  hear  that,  Jo?  [To  Mrs  Gilbey]  Hes 
taken  to  whisky  and  soda.  A  pint  a  week!  And  the  beer 
the  same  as  before! 

Knox.    Oh,  dont  preach,  old  girl. 

Mrs  Knox  [To  Mrs  Gilbey]  Thats  a  new  name  hes  got 
for  me.  [to  Knox]  I  tell  you,  Jo,  this  doesnt  sit  well  on 
you.  You  may  call  it  preaching  if  you  like;  but  it's  the 
truth  for  all  that.  I  say  that  if  youve  happiness  within 
yourself,  you  dont  need  to  seek  it  outside,  spending  money 
on  drink  and  theatres  and  bad  company,  and  being  miser- 
able after  all.  You  can  sit  at  home  and  be  happy;  and 
you  can  work  and  be  happy.  If  you  have  that  in  you,  the 
spirit  will  set  you  free  to  do  what  you  want  and  guide  you 
to  do  right.  But  if  you  havent  got  it,  then  youd  best  be 
respectable  and  stick  to  the  ways  that  are  marked  out  for 
you;  for  youve  nothing  else  to  keep  you  straight. 

Knox  [angrily]  And  is  a  man  never  to  have  a  bit  of  fun? 
See  whats  come  of  it  with  your  daughter!  She  was  to  be 
content  with  your  happiness  that  youre  always  talking 
about;  and  how  did  the  spirit  guide  her?  To  a  month's 
hard  for  being  drunk  and  assaulting  the  police.  Did  /  ever 
assault  the  police? 

Mrs  Knox.  You  wouldnt  have  the  courage.  I  dont 
blame  the  girl. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  J  Oh,  Maria!     What  are  you  saying? 

Gilbey.  J  What!     And  you  so  pious! 


224  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Mbs  Knox.  She  went  where  the  spirit  guided  her.  And 
what  harm  there  was  in  it  she  knew  nothing  about. 

Gilbey.  Oh,  come,  Mrs  Knox!  Girls  are  not  so  inno- 
cent as  all  that. 

Mrs  Knox.  I  dont  say  she  was  ignorant.  But  I  do  say- 
that  she  didnt  know  what  we  know:  I  mean  the  way 
certain  temptations  get  a  sudden  hold  that  no  goodness 
nor  self-control  is  any  use  against.  She  was  saved  from 
that,  and  had  a  rough  lesson  too;  and  I  say  it  was  no 
earthly  protection  that  did  that.  But  dont  think,  you 
two  men,  that  you  11  be  protected  if  you  make  what  she 
did  an  excuse  to  go  and  do  as  you d  like  to  do  if  it  wasnt 
for  fear  of  losing  your  characters.  The  spirit  wont  guide 
you,  because  it  isnt  in  you;  and  it  never  had  been:  not 
in  either  of  you. 

Gilbey  [with  ironic  humility]  I'm  sure  I'm  obliged  to 
you  for  your  good  opinion,  Mrs  Knox. 

Mrs  Knox.  Well,  I  will  say  for  you,  Mr  Gilbey,  that 
youre  better  than  my  man  here.  Hes  a  bitter  hard 
heathen,  is  my  Jo,  God  help  me!     [She  begins  to  cry  quietly], 

Knox.  Now,  dont  take  on  like  that,  Amelia.  You 
know  I  always  give  in  to  you  that  you  were  right  about 
religion.  But  one  of  us  had  to  think  of  other  things,  or 
we'd  have  starved,  we  and  the  child. 

Mrs  Knox.  How  do  you  know  youd  have  starved?  All 
the  other  things  might  have  been  added  unto  you. 

Gilbey.  Come,  Mrs  Knox,  dont  tell  me  Knox  is  a 
sinner.  I  know  better.  I'm  sure  youd  be  the  first  to  be 
sorry  if  anything  was  to  happen  to  him. 

Knox  [bitterly  to  his  wife]  Youve  always  had  some 
grudge  against  me;  and  nobody  but  yourself  can  under- 
stand what  it  is. 

Mrs  Knox.  I  wanted  a  man  who  had  that  happiness 
within  himself.  You  made  me  think  you  had  it;  but  it 
was  nothing  but  being  in  love  with  me. 

Mrs  Gilbey.   And  do  you  blame  him  for  that? 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  225 

Mrs  Knox.  I  blame  nobody.  But  let  him  not  think  he 
can  walk  by  his  own  light.  I  tell  him  that  if  he  gives  up 
being  respectable  he'll  go  right  down  to  the  bottom  of  the 
hill.  He  has  no  powers  inside  himself  to  keep  him  steady; 
so  let  him  cling  to  the  powers  outside  him. 

Knox  [rising  angrily]  Who  wants  to  give  up  being  re- 
spectable? All  this  for  a  pint  of  whisky  that  lasted  a 
week!    How  long  would  it  have  lasted  Simmons,  I  wonder? 

Mrs  Knox  [gently]  Oh,  well,  say  no  more,  Jo.  I  wont 
plague  you  about  it.  [He  sits  down].  You  never  did 
understand;  and  you  never  will.  Hardly  anybody  under- 
stands: even  Margaret  didnt  til  she  went  to  prison.  She 
does  now;  and  I  shall  have  a  companion  in  the  house  after 
all  these  lonely  years. 

Knox  [beginning  to  cry]  I  did  all  I  could  to  make  you 
happy.     I  never  said  a  harsh  word  to  you. 

Gilbey  [rising  indignantly]  What  right  have  you  to 
treat  a  man  like  that?  an  honest  respectable  husband?  as 
if  he  were  dirt  under  your  feet? 

Knox.  Let  her  alone,  Gilbey.  [Gilbey  sits  down,  but 
mutinously]. 

Mrs  Knox.  Well,  you  gave  me  all  you  could,  Jo;  and 
if  it  wasnt  what  I  wanted,  that  wasnt  your  fault.  But  I'd 
rather  have  you  as  you  were  than  since  you  took  to 
whisky  and  soda. 

Knox.  I  dont  want  any  whisky  and  soda.  I'll  take  the 
pledge  if  you  like. 

Mrs  Knox.  No:  you  shall  have  your  beer  because  you 
like  it.  The  whisky  was  only  brag.  And  if  you  and  me 
are  to  remain  friends,  Mr  Gilbey,  youll  get  up  to-morrow 
morning  at  seven. 

Gilbey  [defiantly]    Damme  if  I  will!     There! 

Mrs  Knox  [with  gentle  pity]  How  do  you  know,  Mr 
Gilbey,  what  youll  do  to-morrow  morning? 

Gilbey.  Why  shouldnt  I  know?  Are  we  children  not 
to  be  let  do  what  we  like,  and  our  own  sons  and  daughters 


226  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

kicking  their  heels  all  over  the  place?  [To  Knox]  I  was 
never  one  to  interfere  between  man  and  wife,  Knox;  but 
if  Maria  started  ordering  me  aboutflike  that — 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Now  dont  be  naughty,  Rob.  You  know 
you  mustnt  set  yourself  up  against  religion? 

Gilbey.  Whos  setting  himself  up  against  religion? 
Mrs  Knox.  It  doesnt  matter  whether  you  set  yourself 
up  against  it  or  not,  Mr.  Gilbey.  If  it  sets  itself  up  against 
you,  youll  have  to  go  the  appointed  way:  it's  no  use 
quarrelling  about  it  with  me  that  am  as  great  a  sinner  as 
yourself. 

Gilbey.    Oh,  indeed!  And  who  told  you  I  was  a  sinner? 
Mrs  Gilbey.    Now,  Rob,  you  know  we  are  all  sinners. 
What  else  is  religion? 

Gilbey.  I  say  nothing  against  religion.  I  suppose  we're 
all  sinners,  in  a  manner  of  speaking;  but  I  dont  like  to 
have  it  thrown  at  me  as  if  I'd  really  done  anything. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Mrs  Knox  is  speaking  for  your  good,  Rob. 
Gilbey.    Well,  I  dont  like  to  be  spoken  to  for  my  good. 
Would  anybody  like  it? 

Mrs  Knox.  Dont  take  offence  where  none  is  meant, 
Mr  Gilbey.  Talk  about  something  else.  No  good  ever 
comes  of  arguing  about  such  things  among  the  like  of  us. 

Knox.  The  like  of  us!  Are  you  throwing  it  in  our 
teeth  that  your  people  were  in  the  wholesale  and  thought 
Knox  and  Gilbey  wasnt  good  enough  for  you? 

Mrs  Knox.  No,  Jo:  you  know  I'm  not.  What  better 
were  my  people  than  yours,  for  all  their  pride?  But  Ive 
noticed  it  all  my  life:  we're  ignorant.  We  dont  really 
know  whats  right  and  whats  wrong.  We're  all  right  as 
long  as  things  go  on  the  way  they  always  did.  We  bring 
our  children  up  just  as  we  were  brought  up;  and  we  go  to 
church  or  chapel  just  as  our  parents  did;  and  we  say  what 
everybody  says;  and  it  goes  on  all  right  until  something 
out  of  the  way  happens:  theres  a  family  quarrel,  or  one  of 
the  children  goes  wrong,  or  a  father  takes  to  drink,  or  an 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  227 

aunt  goes  mad,  or  one  of  us  finds  ourselves  doing  some- 
thing we  never  thought  we'd  want  to  do.  And  then  you 
know  what  happens:  complaints  and  quarrels  and  huff 
and  offence  and  bad  language  and  bad  temper  and  regular 
bewilderment  as  if  Satan  possessed  us  all.  We  find  out 
then  that  with  all  our  respectability  and  piety,  weve  no 
real  religion  and  no  way  of  telling  right  from  wrong.  Weve 
nothing  but  our  habits;  and  when  theyre  upset,  where  are 
we?  Just  like  Peter  in  the  storm  trying  to  walk  on  the 
water  and  finding  he  couldnt. 

Mrs  Gilbey  [piously]    Aye!     He  found  out,  didnt  he? 

Gilbey  [reverently]  I  never  denied  that  youve  a  great 
intellect,  Mrs  Knox — 

Mrs  Knox.  Oh  get  along  with  you,  Gilbey,  if  you  be- 
gin talking  about  my  intellect.  Give  us  some  tea,  Maria. 
Ive  said  my  say;  and  Im  sure  I  beg  the  company's  pardon 
for  being  so  long  about  it,  and  so  disagreeable. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Ring,  Rob.  [Gilbey  rings].  Stop.  Juggins 
will  think  we're  ringing  for  him. 

Gilbey  [appalled]  It's  too  late.  I  rang  before  I  thought 
of  it. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Step  down  and  apologize,  Rob. 

Knox.    Is  it  him  that  you  said  was  brother  to  a — 

Juggins  comes  in  with  the  tea-tray.  All  rise.  He  takes 
the  tray  to  Mrs.  Gilbey. 

Gilbey.  I  didnt  mean  to  ask  you  to  do  this,  Mr  Juggins. 
I  wasnt  thinking  when  I  rang. 

Mrs  Gilbey  [trying  to  take  the  tray  from  him]  Let  me, 
Juggins. 

Juggins.  Please  sit  down,  madam.  Allow  me  to  dis- 
charge my  duties  just  as  usual,  sir.  I  assure  you  that  is 
the  correct  thing.  [They  sit  down,  ill  at  ease,  whilst  he 
places  the  tray  on  the  table.     He  then  goes  out  for  the  citrate]. 

Knox  [lowering  his  voice]  Is  this  all  right,  Gilbey? 
Anybody  may  be  the  son  of  a  duke,  you  know.  Is  he 
legitimate? 


228  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Gilbey.    Good  lord!     I  never  thought  of  that. 

Juggins  returns  with  the  cakes.  They  regard  him  with 
suspicion. 

Gilbey  [whispering  to  Knox]    You  ask  him. 

Knox  [to  Juggins]  Just  a  word  with  you,  my  man.  Was 
your  mother  married  to  your  father? 

Juggins.  I  believe  so,  sir.  I  cant  say  from  personal 
knowledge.     It  was  before  my  time. 

Gilbey.    Well,  but  look  here  you  know — [he  hesitates]. 

Juggins.    Yes,  sir? 

Knox.  I  know  whatll  clinch  it,  Gilbey.  You  leave  it  to 
me.     [To  Juggins]  Was  your  mother  the  duchess? 

Juggins.  Yes,  sir.  Quite  correct,  sir,  I  assure  you. 
[To  Mrs  Gilbey]  That  is  the  milk,  madam.  [She  has  mis- 
taken the  jugs].     This  is  the  water. 

They  stare  at  him  in  pitiable  embarrassment. 

Mrs  Knox.  What  did  I  tell  you?  Heres  something  out 
of  the  common  happening  with  a  servant;  and  we  none 
of  us  know  how  to  behave. 

Juggins.  It's  quite  simple,  madam.  I'm  a  footman, 
and  should  be  treated  as  a  footman.  [He  proceeds  calmly 
with  his  duties,  handing  round  cups  of  tea  as  Mrs  Knox  fills 
them]. 

Shrieks  of  laughter  from  below  stairs  reach  the  ears  of  tlie 
company. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Whats  that  noise?  Is  Master  Bobby  at 
home?     I  heard  his  laugh. 

Mrs  Knox.    I'm  sure  I  heard  Margaret's. 

Gilbey.   Not  a  bit  of  it.     It  was  that  woman. 

Juggins.  I  can  explain,  sir.  I  must  ask  you  to  excuse 
the  liberty;  but  I'm  entertaining  a  small  party  to  tea  in 
my  pantry. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  But  youre  not  entertaining  Master 
Bobby? 

Juggins.    Yes,  madam. 

Gilbey.    Who's  with  him? 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  229 

Juggins.    Miss  Knox,  sir. 

Gilbey.  Miss  Knox!  Are  you  sure?  Is  there  anyone 
else? 

Juggins.  Only  a  French  marine  officer,  sir,  and — er — 
Miss  Delaney.  [He  places  Gilbey's  tea  on  the  table  before 
him].     The  lady  that  called  about  Master  Bobby,  sir. 

Knox.  Do  you  mean  to  say  theyre  having  a  party  all 
to  themselves  downstairs,  and  we  having  a  party  up  here 
and  knowing  nothing  about  it? 

Juggins.  Yes,  sir.  I  have  to  do  a  good  deal  of  enter- 
taining in  the  pantry  for  Master  Bobby,  sir. 

Gilbey.    Well,  this  is  a  nice  state  of  things! 

Knox.  Whats  the  meaning  of  it?  What  do  they  do  it 
for? 

Juggins.    To  enjoy  themselves,  sir,  I  should  think. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Enjoy  themselves!  Did  lever  anybody 
hear  of  such  a  thing? 

Gilbey.    Knox's  daughter  shewn  into  my  pantry! 

Knox.  Margaret  mixing  with  a  Frenchman  and  a  foot- 
man— [Suddenly  realizing  that  the  footman  is  offering  him 
cake]  She  doesnt  know  about — about  His  Grace,  you  know. 

Mrs  Gilbey.    Perhaps  she  does.    Does  she,  Mr  Juggins? 

Juggins.  The  other  lady  suspects  me,  madam.  They 
call  me  Rudolph,  or  the  Long  Lost  Heir. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  It's  a  much  nicer  name  than  Juggins.  I 
think  I'll  call  you  by  it,  if  you  dont  mind. 

Juggins.    Not  at  all,  madam. 

Roars  of  merriment  from  below. 

Gilbey.  Go  and  tell  them  to  stop  laughing.  What  right 
have  they  to  make  a  noise  like  that? 

Juggins.  I  asked  them  not  to  laugh  so  loudly,  sir.  But 
the  French  gentleman  always  sets  them  off  again. 

Knox.  Do  you  mean  to  tell  me  that  my  daughter 
laughs  at  a  Frenchman's  jokes? 

Gilbey.    We  all  know  what  French  jokes  are. 

Juggins.    Believe  me:  you  do  not,  sir.     The  noise  this 


230  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

afternoon  has  all  been  because  the  Frenchman  said  that 
the  cat  had  whooping  cough. 

Mes  Gilbey  [laughing  heartily]    Well,  I  never! 

Gilbey.  Dont  be  a  fool,  Maria.  Look  here,  Knox:  we 
cant  let  this  go  on.  People  cant  be  allowed  to  behave  like 
this. 

Knox.   Just  what  I  say. 

A  concertina  adds  its  music  to  the  revelry. 

Mrs  Gilbey  [excited]  Thats  the  squiffer.  Hes  bought 
it  for  her. 

Gilbey.  Well,  of  all  the  scandalous — [Redoubled  laughter 
from  below], 

Knox.  I'll  put  a  stop  to  this.  [Be  goes  out  to  the  landing 
and  shouts]  Margaret!     [Sudden  dead  silence].     Margaret, 

I  say! 

Margaret's  Voice.    Yes,  father.    Shall  we  all  come  up? 

We're  dying  to. 

Knox.  Come  up  and  be  ashamed  of  yourselves,  behav- 
ing like  wild  Indians. 

Dora's  Voice  [screaming]  Oh!  oh!  oh!  Dont,  Bobby. 
Now — oh!  [In  headlong  flight  she  dashes  into  and  right 
across  the  room,  breathless,  and  slightly  abashed  by  the  com- 
pany]. I  beg  your  pardon,  Mrs  Gilbey,  for  coming  in  like 
that;  but  whenever  I  go  upstairs  in  front  of  Bobby,  he  pre- 
tends it's  a  cat  biting  my  ankles;  and  I  just  must  scream. 

Bobby  and  Margaret  enter  rather  more  shyly,  but  evidently 
in  high  spirits.  Bobby  places  himself  near  his  father,  on  the 
hearthrug,  and  presently  slips  down  into  the  arm-chair. 

Margaret.  How  do  you  do,  Mrs.  Gilbey?  [She  posts 
herself  behind  her  mother]. 

Duvallet  comes  in  behaving  himself  perfectly.  Knox  fol- 
lows. 

Margaret.  Oh — let  me  introduce.  My  friend  Lieu- 
tenant Duvallet.  Mrs  Gilbey.  Mr  Gilbey.  [Duvallet  bows 
and  sits  down  on  Mr  Knox's  left,  Juggins  placing  a  chair  for 
him]. 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  231 

Dora.    Now,  Bobby:  introduce  me:  theres  a  dear. 

Bobby  [a  little  nervous  about  it;  but  trying  to  keep  up  his 
spirits]  Miss  Delaney:  Mr  and  Mrs  Knox.  [Knox,  as  he 
resumes  his  seat,  acknowledges  the  introduction  suspiciously. 
Mrs  Knox  bows  gravely,  looking  keenly  at  Dora  and  taking 
her  measure  without  prejudice], 

Dora.  Pleased  to  meet  you.  [Juggins  places  the  baby 
rocking-chair  for  her  on  Mrs  Gilbey'' s  right,  opposite  Mrs 
Knox].  Thank  you.  [She  sits  and  turns  to  Mrs  Gilbey] 
Bobby's  given  me  the  squiffer.  [To  the  company  generally] 
Do  you  know  what  theyve  been  doing  downstairs?  [She 
goes  off  into  ecstasies  of  mirth].  Youd  never  guess.  Theyve 
been  trying  to  teach  me  table  manners.  The  Lieutenant 
and  Rudolph  say  I'm  a  regular  pig.  I'm  sure  I  never  knew 
there  was  anything  wrong  with  me.  But  live  and  learn 
[to  Gilbey]  eh,  old  dear? 

Juggins.  Old  dear  is  not  correct,  Miss  Delaney.  [He 
retires  to  the  end  of  the  sideboard  nearest  the  door]. 

Dora.  Oh  get  out!  I  must  call  a  man  something.  He 
doesnt  mind:  do  you,  Charlie? 

Mrs  Gilbey.    His  name  isnt  Charlie. 

Dora.    Excuse  me.     I  call  everybody  Charlie. 

Juggins.    You  mustnt. 

Dora.  Oh,  if  I  were  to  mind  you,  I  should  have  to  hold 
my  tongue  altogether;  and  then  how  sorry  youd  be! 
Lord,  how  I  do  run  on!     Dont  mind  me,  Mrs  Gilbey. 

Knox.  What  I  want  to  know  is,  whats  to  be  the  end  of 
this?  It's  not  for  me  to  interfere  between  you  and  your 
son,  Gilbey:  he  knows  his  own  intentions  best,  no  doubt, 
and  perhaps  has  told  them  to  you.  But  Ive  my  daughter 
to  look  after;  and  it's  my  duty  as  a  parent  to  have  a  clear 
understanding  about  her.  No  good  is  ever  done  by  beating 
about  the  bush.  I  ask  Lieutenant — well,  I  dont  speak 
French;  and  I  cant  pronounce  the  name — 

Margaret.    Mr  Duvallet,  father. 

Knox.    I  ask  Mr  Doovalley  what  his  intentions  are. 


232  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Makgaret.    Oh  father:  how  can  you? 

Duvallet.  I'm  afraid  my  knowledge  of  English  is  not 
enough  to  understand.     Intentions?     How? 

Margaret.    He  wants  to  know  will  you  marry  me. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  1  What  a  thing  to  say! 

Knox.  >  Silence,  miss. 

Dora.  J  Well,  thats  straight,  aint  it? 

Duvallet.  But  I  am  married  already.  I  have  two 
daughters. 

Knox  [rising,  virtuously  indignant]  You  sit  there  after 
carrying  on  with  my  daughter,  and  tell  me  coolly  youre 
married. 

Margaret.  Papa:  you  really  must  not  tell  people  that 
they  sit  there.     [He  sits  down  again  sulkily]. 

Duvallet.  Pardon.  Carrying  on?  What  does  that 
mean? 

Margaret.    It  means — 

Knox  [violently]  Hold  your  tongue,  you  shameless 
young  hussy.     Dont  you  dare  say  what  it  means. 

Duvallet  [shrugging  his  shoulders]  What  does  it  mean, 
Rudolph? 

Mrs  Knox.  If  it's  not  proper  for  her  to  say,  it's  not 
proper  for  a  man  to  say,  either.  Mr  Doovalley:  youre  a 
married  man  with  daughters.  Would  you  let  them  go 
about  with  a  stranger,  as  you  are  to  us,  without  wanting 
to  know  whether  he  intended  to  behave  honorably? 

Duvallet.  Ah,  madam,  my  daughters  are  French  girls. 
That  is  very  different.  It  would  not  be  correct  for  a  French 
girl  to  go  about  alone  and  speak  to  men  as  English  and 
American  girls  do.  That  is  why  I  so  immensely  admire  the 
English  people.  You  are  so  free — so  unprejudiced — your 
women  are  so  brave  and  frank — their  minds  are  so — how 
do  you  say? — wholesome.  I  intend  to  have  my  daughters 
educated  in  England.  Nowhere  else  in  the  world  but  in 
England  could  I  have  met  at  a  Variety  Theatre  a  charming 
young  lady  of  perfect  respectability,  and  enjoyed  a  dance 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  233 

with  her  at  a  public  dancing  saloon.  And  where  else  are 
women  trained  to  box  and  knock  out  the  teeth  of  policemen 
as  a  protest  against  injustice  and  violence?  [Rising,  with 
immense  elan]  Your  daughter,  madam,  is  superb.  Your 
country  is  a  model  to  the  rest  of  Europe.  If  you  were  a 
Frenchman,  stifled  with  prudery,  hypocrisy  and  the  tyr- 
anny of  the  family  and  the  home,  you  would  understand 
how  an  enlightened  Frenchman  admires  and  envies  your 
freedom,  your  broadmindedness,  and  the  fact  that  home 
life  can  hardly  be  said  to  exist  in  England.  You  have 
made  an  end  of  the  despotism  of  the  parent;  the  family 
council  is  unknown  to  you;  everywhere  in  these  islands  one 
can  enjoy  the  exhilarating,  the  soul-liberating  spectacle 
of  men  quarrelling  with  their  brothers,  defying  their  fathers, 
refusing  to  speak  to  their  mothers.  In  France  we  are  not 
men:  we  are  only  sons — grown-up  children.  Here  one  is 
a  human  being — an  end  in  himself.  Oh,  Mrs  Knox,  if 
only  your  military  genius  were  equal  to  your  moral  genius 
— if  that  conquest  of  Europe  by  France  which  inaugurated 
the  new  age  after  the  Revolution  had  only  been  an  English 
conquest,  how  much  more  enlightened  the  world  would 
have  been  now!  We,  alas,  can  only  fight.  France  is  un- 
conquerable. We  impose  our  narrow  ideas,  our  prejudices, 
our  obsolete  institutions,  our  insufferable  pedantry  on  the 
world  by  brute  force — by  that  stupid  quality  of  military 
heroism  which  shews  how  little  we  have  evolved  from  the 
savage:  nay,  from  the  beast.  We  can  charge  like  bulls; 
we  can  spring  on  our  foes  like  gamecocks;  when  we  are 
overpowered  by  reason,  we  can  die  fighting  like  rats. 
And  we  are  foolish  enough  to  be  proud  of  it!  Why  should 
we  be?  Does  the  bull  progress?  Can  you  civilize  the 
gamecock?  Is  there  any  future  for  the  rat?  We  cant 
even  fight  intelligently:  when  we  lose  battles,  it  is  because 
we  have  not  sense  enough  to  know  when  we  are  beaten. 
At  Waterloo,  had  we  known  when  we  were  beaten,  we 
should  have  retreated;  tried  another  plan;  and  won  the 


234  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

battle.  But  no:  we  were  too  pigheaded  to  admit  that 
there  is  anything  impossible  to  a  Frenchman:  we  were 
quite  satisfied  when  our  Marshals  had  six  horses  shot  under 
them,  and  our  stupid  old  grognards  died  fighting  rather 
than  surrender  like  reasonable  beings.  Think  of  your 
great  Wellington:  think  of  his  inspiring  words,  when  the 
lady  asked  him  whether  British  soldiers  ever  ran  away. 
"All  soldiers  run  away,  madam,"  he  said;  "but  if  there  are 
supports  for  them  to  fall  back  on  it  does  not  matter." 
Think  of  your  illustrious  Nelson,  always  beaten  on  land, 
always  victorious  at  sea,  where  his  men  could  not  run 
away.  You  are  not  dazzled  and  misled  by  false  ideals  of 
patriotic  enthusiasm:  your  honest  and  sensible  statesmen 
demand  for  England  a  two-power  standard,  even  a  three- 
power  standard,  frankly  admitting  that  it  is  wise  to  fight 
three  to  one:  whilst  we,  fools  and  braggarts  as  we  are,  de- 
clare that  every  Frenchman  is  a  host  in  himself,  and  that 
when  one  Frenchman  attacks  three  Englishmen  he  is 
guilty  of  an  act  of  cowardice  comparable  to  that  of  the 
man  who  strikes  a  woman.  It  is  folly:  it  is  nonsense:  a 
Frenchman  is  not  really  stronger  than  a  German,  than  an 
Italian,  even  than  an  Englishman.  Sir:  if  all  Frenchwomen 
were  like  your  daughter — if  all  Frenchmen  had  the  good 
sense,  the  power  of  seeing  things  as  they  really  are,  the 
calm  judgment,  the  open  mind,  the  philosophic  grasp,  the 
foresight  and  true  courage,  which  are  so  natural  to  you  as 
an  Englishman  that  you  are  hardly  conscious  of  possessing 
them,  France  would  become  the  greatest  nation  in  the  world. 

Margaret.  Three  cheers  for  old  England !  [She  shakes 
hands  with  him  warmly]. 

Bobby.    Hurra-a-ay!    And  so  say  all  of  us. 

Duvallet,  having  responded  to  Margaret's  handshake  with 
enthusiasm,  kisses  Juggins  on  both  cheeks,  and  sinks  into  his 
chair,  wiping  his  perspiring  brow. 

Gilbey.  Well,  this  sort  of  talk  is  above  me.  Can  you 
make  anything  out  of  it,  Knox? 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  235 

Knox.  The  long  and  short  of  it  seems  to  be  that  he  cant 
lawfully  marry  my  daughter,  as  he  ought  after  going  to 
prison  with  her. 

Dora.  I'm  ready  to  marry  Bobby,  if  that  will  be  any 
satisfaction. 

Gilbey.    No  you  dont.    Not  if  I  know  it. 

Mrs  Knox.    He  ought  to,  Mr  Gilbey. 

Gilbey.  Well,  if  thats  your  religion,  Amelia  Knox,  I 
want  no  more  of  it.  Would  you  invite  them  to  your  house 
if  he  married  her? 

Mrs  Knox.    He  ought  to  marry  her  whether  or  no. 

Bobby.    I  feel  I  ought  to,  Mrs  Knox. 

Gilbey.    Hold  your  tongue.     Mind  your  own  business. 

Bobby  [wildly]  If  I'm  not  let  marry  her,  I'll  do  some- 
thing downright  disgraceful.     I'll  enlist  as  a  soldier. 

Juggins.    That  is  not  a  disgrace,  sir. 

Bobby.  Not  for  you,  perhaps.  But  youre  only  a  foot- 
man.   I'm  a  gentleman. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  Dont  dare  to  speak  disrespectfully  to  Mr 
Rudolph,  Bobby.     For  shame! 

Juggins  [coming  forward  to  the  middle  of  the  table]  It  is  not 
gentlemanly  to  regard  the  service  of  your  country  as 
disgraceful.  It  is  gentlemanly  to  marry  the  lady  you  make 
love  to. 

Gilbey  [aghast]  My  boy  is  to  marry  this  woman  and 
be  a  social  outcast! 

Juggins.  Your  boy  and  Miss  Delaney  will  be  inexorably 
condemned  by  respectable  society  to  spend  the  rest  of  their 
days  in  precisely  the  sort  of  company  they  seem  to  like 
best  and  be  most  at  home  in. 

Knox.  And  my  daughter?  Whos  to  marry  my  daughter? 

Juggins.  Your  daughter,  sir,  will  probably  marry  who- 
ever she  makes  up  her  mind  to  marry.  She  is  a  lady  of 
very  determined  character. 

Knox.  Yes:  if  he'd  have  her  with  her  character  gone. 
But  who  would?    Youre  the  brother  of  a  duke.     Would — 


236  Fanny's  First  Play  Act  III 

Bobby.  1    f  Whats  that? 

Margaret.   I  J  Juggins  a  duke? 

Duvallet.  Comment! 

Dora.  J    [  What  did  I  tell  you? 

Knox.  Yes:  the  brother  of  a  duke:  thats  what  he  is. 
[To  Juggins]    Well,  would  you  marry  her? 

Juggins.  I  was  about  to  propose  that  solution  of  your 
problem,  Mr  Knox. 

Mrs  Gilbey.  "i    r  Well  I  never! 

Knox.  \  \  D'ye  mean  it? 

Mrs  Knox.     J    I  Marry  Margaret! 

Juggins  {continuing]  As  an  idle  younger  son,  unable  to 
support  myself,  or  even  to  remain  in  the  Guards  in  com- 
petition with  the  grandsons  of  American  millionaires,  I 
could  not  have  aspired  to  Miss  Knox's  hand.  But  as  a 
sober,  honest,  and  industrious  domestic  servant,  who  has, 
I  trust,  given  satisfaction  to  his  employer  [he  bows  to  Mr 
Gilbey]  I  feel  I  am  a  man  with  a  character.  It  is  for  Miss 
Knox  to  decide. 

Margaret.  I  got  into  a  frightful  row  once  for  admiring 
you,  Rudolph. 

Juggins.  I  should  have  got  into  an  equally  frightful 
row  myself,  Miss,  had  I  betrayed  my  admiration  for  you. 
I  looked  forward  to  those  weekly  dinners. 

Mrs  Knox.  But  why  did  a  gentleman  like  you  stoop  to 
be  a  footman? 

Dora.    He  stooped  to  conquer. 

Margaret.    Shut  up,  Dora:  I  want  to  hear. 

Juggins.  I  will  explain ;  but  only  Mrs  Knox  will  under- 
stand. I  once  insulted  a  servant — rashly;  for  he  was  a 
sincere  Christian.  He  rebuked  me  for  trifling  with  a  girl 
of  his  own  class.  I  told  him  to  remember  what  he  was, 
and  to  whom  he  was  speaking.  He  said  God  would  re- 
member.    I  discharged  him  on  the  spot. 

Gilbey.    Very  properly. 

Knox.  What  right  had  he  to  mention  such  a  thing  to  you? 


Act  III  Fanny's  First  Play  237 

Mrs  Gilbey.    What  are  servants  coming  to? 

Mrs  Knox.    Did  it  come  true,  what  he  said? 

Juggins.  It  stuck  like  a  poisoned  arrow.  It  rankled 
for  months.  Then  I  gave  in.  I  apprenticed  myself  to  an 
old  butler  of  ours  who  kept  a  hotel.  He  taught  me  my 
present  business,  and  got  me  a  place  as  footman  with 
Mr  Gilbey.  If  ever  I  meet  that  man  again  I  shall  be  able 
to  look  him  in  the  face. 

Mrs  Knox.  Margaret:  it's  not  on  account  of  the  duke: 
dukes  are  vanities.     But  take  my  advice  and  take  him. 

Margaret  [slipping  her  arm  through  his]  I  have  loved 
Juggins  since  the  first  day  I  beheld  him.  I  felt  instinc- 
tively he  had  been  in  the  Guards.  May  he  walk  out  with 
me,  Mr  Gilbey? 

Knox.  Dont  be  vulgar,  girl.  Remember  your  new  posi- 
tion. [To  Juggins]  I  suppose  youre  serious  about  this, 
Mr— Mr  Rudolph? 

Juggins.  I  propose,  with  your  permission,  to  begin 
keeping  company  this  afternoon,  if  Mrs  Gilbey  can  spare 
me. 

Gilbey  [in  a  gust  of  envy,  to  Bobby]  Itll  be  long  enough 
before  youll  marry  the  sister  of  a  duke,  you  young  good- 
for-nothing. 

Dora.  Dont  fret,  old  dear.  Rudolph  will  teach  me 
high-class  manners.  I  call  it  quite  a  happy  ending:  dont 
you,  lieutenant? 

Duvallet.  In  France  it  would  be  impossible.  But 
here — ah!  [kissing  his  hand]  la  belle  Angleterre! 


EPILOGUE 

Before  the  curtain.  The  Count,  dazed  and  agitated,  hurries 
to  the  4  critics,  as  they  rise,  bored  and  weary,  from  their  seats. 

The  Count.  Gentlemen:  do  not  speak  to  me.  I  im- 
plore you  to  withhold  your  opinion.  I  am  not  strong 
enough  to  bear  it.  I  could  never  have  believed  it.  Is  this 
a  play?  Is  this  in  any  sense  of  the  word,  Art?  Is  it 
agreeable?  Can  it  conceivably  do  good  to  any  human 
being?  Is  it  delicate?  Do  such  people  really  exist?  Ex- 
cuse me,  gentlemen:  I  speak  from  a  wounded  heart. 
There  are  private  reasons  for  my  discomposure.  This 
play  implies  obscure,  unjust,  unkind  reproaches  and  men- 
aces to  all  of  us  who  are  parents. 

Trotter.  Pooh!  you  take  it  too  seriously.  After  all, 
the  thing  has  amusing  passages.  Dismiss  the  rest  as 
impertinence. 

The  Count.  Mr  Trotter:  it  is  easy  for  you  to  play  the 
pococurantist.  [Trotter,  amazed,  repeats  the  first  three  sylla- 
bles in  his  throat,  making  a  noise  like  a  pheasant].  You  see 
hundreds  of  plays  every  year.  But  to  me,  who  have  never 
seen  anything  of  this  kind  before,  the  effect  of  this  play 
is  terribly  disquieting.  Sir:  if  it  had  been  what  people  call 
an  immoral  play,  I  shouldnt  have  minded  a  bit.  [Vaughan 
is  shocked].  Love  beautifies  every  romance  and  justifies 
every  audacity.  [Bannal  assents  gravely].  But  there  are 
reticences   which  everybody  should  respect.     There  are 

238 


Fanny's  First  Play  239 

decencies  too  subtle  to  be  put  into  words,  without  which 
human  society  would  be  unbearable.  People  could  not 
talk  to  one  another  as  those  people  talk.  No  child  could 
speak  to  its  parent — no  girl  could  speak  to  a  youth — no 
human  creature  could  tear  down  the  veils — [Appealing  to 
Vaughan,  who  is  on  his-  left  flank,  with  Gunn  between  them] 
Could  they,  sir? 

Vaughan.    Well,  I  dont  see  that. 

The  Count.  You  dont  see  it!  dont  feel  it!  [To  Gunn] 
Sir:  I  appeal  to  you. 

Gunn  [with  studied  weariness]  It  seems  to  me  the  most 
ordinary  sort  of  old-fashioned  Ibsenite  drivel. 

The  Count  [turning  to  Trotter,  who  is  on  his  right,  be- 
tween him  and  Bannal]  Mr  Trotter:  will  you  tell  me  that 
you  are  not  amazed,  outraged,  revolted,  wounded  in  your 
deepest  and  holiest  feelings  by  every  word  of  this  play, 
every  tone,  every  implication;  that  you  did  not  sit  there 
shrinking  in  every  fibre  at  the  thought  of  what  might 
come  next? 

Trotter.  Not  a  bit.  Any  clever  modern  girl  could 
turn  out  that  kind  of  thing  by  the  yard. 

The  Count.  Then,  sir,  tomorrow  I  start  for  Venice, 
never  to  return.  I  must  believe  what  you  tell  me.  I  per- 
ceive that  you  are  not  agitated,  not  surprised,  not  con- 
cerned; that  my  own  horror  (yes,  gentlemen,  horror — 
horror  of  the  very  soul)  appears  unaccountable  to  you, 
ludicrous,  absurd,  even  to  you,  Mr  Trotter,  who  are  little 
younger  than  myself.  Sir:  if  young  people  spoke  to  me 
like  that,  I  should  die  of  shame:  I  could  not  face  it.  I 
must  go  back.  The  world  has  passed  me  by  and  left  me. 
Accept  the  apologies  of  an  elderly  and  no  doubt  ridiculous 
admirer  of  the  art  of  a  bygone  day,  when  there  was  still 
some  beauty  in  the  world  and  some  delicate  grace  in 
family  life.  But  I  promised  my  daughter  your  opinion; 
and  I  must  keep  my  word.  Gentlemen:  you  are  the 
choice  and  master  spirits  of  this  age:  you  walk  through 


240  Fanny's  First  Play 

it  without  bewilderment  and  face  its  strange  products 
without  dismay.  Pray  deliver  your  verdict.  Mr  Bannal: 
you  know  that  it  is  the  custom  at  a  Court  Martial  for  the 
youngest  officer  present  to  deliver  his  judgment  first;  so 
that  he  may  not  be  influenced  by  the  authority  of  his 
elders.  You  are  the  youngest.  What  is  your  opinion  of 
the  play? 

Bannal.    Well,  whos  it  by? 

The  Count.    That  is  a  secret  for  the  present. 

Bannal.  You  dont  expect  me  to  know  what  to  say 
about  a  play  when  I  dont  know  who  the  author  is,  do  you? 

The  Count.    Why  not? 

Bannal.  Why  not!  Why  not!!  Suppose  you  had  to 
write  about  a  play  by  Pinero  and  one  by  Jones!  Would 
you  say  exactly  the  same  thing  about  them? 

The  Count.    I  presume  not. 

Bannal.  Then  how  could  you  write  about  them  until 
you  knew  which  was  Pinero  and  which  was  Jones?  Be- 
sides, what  sort  of  play  is  this?  thats  what  I  want  to  know. 
Is  it  a  comedy  or  a  tragedy?  Is  it  a  farce  or  a  melodrama? 
Is  it  repertory  theatre  tosh,  or  really  straight  paying  stuff? 

Gunn.    Cant  you  tell  from  seeing  it? 

Bannal.  I  can  see  it  all  right  enough;  but  how  am  I  to 
know  how  to  take  it?  Is  it  serious,  or  is  it  spoof?  If  the 
author  knows  what  his  play  is,  let  him  tell  us  what  it  is. 
If  he  doesnt,  he  cant  complain  if  I  dont  know  either.  Z'm 
not  the  author. 

The  Count.  But  is  it  a  good  play,  Mr  Bannal?  Thats 
a  simple  question. 

Bannal.  Simple  enough  when  you  know.  If  it's  by  a 
good  author,  it's  a  good  play,  naturally.  That  stands  to 
reason.  Who  is  the  author?  Tell  me  that;  and  I'll  place 
the  play  for  you  to  a  hair's  breadth. 

The  Count.  I'm  sorry  I'm  not  at  liberty  to  divulge  the 
author's  name.  The  author  desires  that  the  play  should 
be  judged  on  its  merits. 


Fanny's  First  Play  241 

Bannal.  But  what  merits  can  it  have  except  the 
author's  merits?     Who  would  you  say  it's  by,  Gunn? 

Gunn.  Well,  who  do  you  think?  Here  you  have  a 
rotten  old-fashioned  domestic  melodrama  acted  by  the 
usual  stage  puppets.  The  hero's  a  naval  lieutenant.  All 
melodramatic  heroes  are  naval  lieutenants.  The  heroine 
gets  into  trouble  by  defying  the  law  (if  she  didnt  get  into 
trouble,  thered  be  no  drama)  and  plays  for  sympathy  all 
the  time  as  hard  as  she  can.  Her  good  old  pious  mother 
turns  on  her  cruel  father  when  hes  going  to  put  her  out  of 
the  house,  and  says  she'll  go  too.  Then  theres  the  comic 
relief:  the  comic  shopkeeper,  the  comic  shopkeeper's 
wife,  the  comic  footman  who  turns  out  to  be  a  duke  in 
disguise,  and  the  young  scapegrace  who  gives  the  author 
his  excuse  for  dragging  in  a  fast  young  woman.  All  as  old 
and  stale  as  a  fried  fish  shop  on  a  winter  morning. 

The  Count.    But — 

Gunn  [interrupting  him]  I  know  what  youre  going  to 
say,  Count.  Youre  going  to  say  that  the  whole  thing 
seems  to  you  to  be  quite  new  and  unusual  and  original. 
The  naval  lieutenant  is  a  Frenchman  who  cracks  up  the 
English  and  runs  down  the  French:  the  hackneyed  old 
Shaw  touch.  The  characters  are  second-rate  middle  class, 
instead  of  being  dukes  and  millionaires.  The  heroine  gets 
kicked  through  the  mud:  real  mud.  Theres  no  plot.  All 
the  old  stage  conventions  and  puppets  without  the  old 
ingenuity  and  the  old  enjoyment.  And  a  feeble  air  of 
intellectual  pretentiousness  kept  up  all  through  to  per- 
suade you  that  if  the  author  hasnt  written  a  good  play  it's 
because  hes  too  clever  to  stoop  to  anything  so  common- 
place. And  you  three  experienced  men  have  sat  through 
all  this,  and  cant  tell  me  who  wrote  it!  Why,  the  play 
bears  the  author's  signature  in  every  line. 

Bannal.    Who? 

Gunn.  Granville  Barker,  of  course.  Why,  old  Gilbey 
is  straight  out  of  The  Madras  House. 


242  Fanny's  First  Play 

Bannal.    Poor  old  Barker! 

Vaughan.  Utter  nonsense!  Cant  you  see  the  differ- 
ence in  style? 

Bannal.   No. 

Vaughan  [contemptuously]    Do  you  know  what  style  is? 

Bannal.  Well,  I  suppose  youd  call  Trotter's  uniform 
style.     But  it's  not  my  style — since  you  ask  me. 

Vaughan.  To  me  it's  perfectly  plain  who  wrote  that 
play.  To  begin  with,  it's  intensely  disagreeable.  There- 
fore it's  not  by  Barrie,  in  spite  of  the  footman,  who's 
cribbed  from  The  Admirable  Crichton.  He  was  an  earl, 
you  may  remember.  You  notice,  too,  the  author's  offen- 
sive habit  of  saying  silly  things  that  have  no  real  sense  in 
them  when  you  come  to  examine  them,  just  to  set  all  the 
fools  in  the  house  giggling.  Then  what  does  it  all  come  to? 
An  attempt  to  expose  the  supposed  hypocrisy  of  the  Puri- 
tan middle  class  in  England:  people  just  as  good  as  the 
author,  anyhow.  With,  of  course,  the  inevitable  improper 
female:  the  Mrs  Tanqueray,  Iris,  and  so  forth.  Well,  if 
you  cant  recognize  the  author  of  that,  youve  mistaken 
your  professions:  thats  all  I  have  to  say. 

Bannal.  Why  are  you  so  down  on  Pinero?  And  what 
about  that  touch  that  Gunn  spotted?  the  Frenchman's 
long  speech.    I  believe  it's  Shaw. 

Gunn.    Rubbish! 

Vaughan.  Rot!  You  may  put  that  idea  out  of  your 
head,  Bannal.  Poor  as  this  play  is,  theres  the  note  of 
passion  in  it.  You  feel  somehow  that  beneath  all  the 
assumed  levity  of  that  poor  waif  and  stray,  she  really 
loves  Bobby  and  will  be  a  good  wife  to  him.  Now  Ive 
repeatedly  proved  that  Shaw  is  physiologically  incapable 
of  the  note  of  passion. 

Bannal.  Yes,  I  know.  Intellect  without  emotion. 
Thats  right.  I  always  saythat  myself.  A  giant  brain,  if 
you  ask  me;  but  no  heart. 

Gunn.   Oh,   shut   up,   Bannal.     This   crude   medieval 


Fanny's  First  Play  243 

psychology  of  heart  and  brain — Shakespear  would  have 
called  it  liver  and  wits — is  really  schoolboyish.  Surely 
weve  had  enough  of  second-hand  Schopenhauer.  Even 
such  a  played-out  old  back  number  as  Ibsen  would  have 
been  ashamed  of  it.     Heart  and  brain,  indeed! 

Vaughan.  You  have  neither  one  nor  the  other,  Gunn. 
Youre  decadent. 

Gunn.  Decadent!  How  I  love  that  early  Victorian 
word ! 

Vaughan.  Well,  at  all  events,  you  cant  deny  that  the 
characters  in  this  play  were  quite  distinguishable  from 
one  another.  That  proves  it's  not  by  Shaw,  because  all 
Shaw's  characters  are  himself:  mere  puppets  stuck  up  to 
spout  Shaw.  It's  only  the  actors  that  make  them  seem 
different. 

Bannal.  There  can  be  no  doubt  of  that:  everybody 
knows  it.  But  Shaw  doesnt  write  his  plays  as  plays.  All 
he  wants  to  do  is  to  insult  everybody  all  round  and  set  us 
talking  about  him. 

Trotter  [wearily]  And  naturally,  here  we  are  all  talking 
about  him.     For  heaven's  sake,  let  us  change  the  subject. 

Vaughan.    Still,  my  articles  about  Shaw — 

Gunn.  Oh,  stow  it,  Vaughan.  Drop  it.  What  Ive 
always  told  you  about  Shaw  is — 

Bannal.  There  you  go,  Shaw,  Shaw,  Shaw!  Do  chuck 
it.     If  you  want  to  know  my  opinion  about  Shaw — 

No,  please,  we  dont. 
Shut  your  head,  Bannal. 
Oh,  do  drop  it. 

The  deafened  Count  puts  his  fingers  in  his  ears  and  flies 
from  the  centre  of  the  group  to  its  outskirts,  behind  Vaughan. 

Bannal  [sulkily]  Oh,  very  well.  Sorry  I  spoke,  I'm 
sure. 

Trotter 

[beginning  again  simultaneously] 


Trotter 
Vaughan  \  [yelling] 

Gunn        J 


Vaughan 
Gunn 


Shaw — 
Shaw — 
Shaw — 


244  Fanny's  First  Play 

They  are  cut  short  by  the  entry  of  Fanny  through  the  cur- 
tains.    She  is  almost  in  tears. 

Fanny  [coming  between  Trotter  and  [Gunn]  I'm  so  sorry, 
gentlemen.  And  it  was  such  a  success  when  I  read  it  to 
the  Cambridge  Fabian  Society! 

Trotter.  Miss  O'Dowda:  I  was  about  to  tell  these 
gentlemen  what  I  guessed  before  the  curtain  rose:  that 
you  are  the  author  of  the  play.  [General  amazement  and 
consternation]. 

Fanny.  And  you  all  think  it  beastly.  You  hate  it. 
You  think  I'm  a  conceited  idiot,  and  that  I  shall  never  be 
able  to  write  anything  decent. 

She  is  almost  weeping.  A  wave  of  sympathy  carries  away 
the  critics. 

Vaughan.  No,  no.  Why,  I  was  just  saying  that  it  must 
have  been  written  by  Pinero.     Didnt  I,  Gunn? 

Fanny  [enormously  flattered]    Really? 

Trotter.  I  thought  Pinero  was  much  too  popular  for 
the  Cambridge  Fabian  Society. 

Fanny.  Oh  yes,  of  course;  but  still — Oh,  did  you  really 
say  that,  Mr  Vaughan? 

Gunn.  I  owe  you  an  apology,  Miss  O'Dowda.  I  said 
it  was  by  Barker. 

Fanny  [radiant]  Granville  Barker!  Oh,  you  couldnt 
really  have  thought  it  so  fine  as  that. 

Bannal.    /  said  Bernard  Shaw. 

Fanny.  Oh,  of  course  it  would  be  a  little  like  Bernard 
Shaw.     The  Fabian  touch,  you  know. 

Bannal  [coming  to  her  encouragingly]  A  jolly  good  little 
play,  Miss  O'Dowda.  Mind:  I  dont  say  it's  like  one  of 
Shakespear's — Hamlet  or  The  Lady  of  Lyons,  you  know 
--but  still,  a  firstrate  little  bit  of  work.  [He  shakes  her 
hand]. 

Gunn  [following  Bannal's  example]  I  also,  Miss 
O'Dowda.     Capital.     Charming.     [He  shakes  hands], 

Vaughan  [with  maudlin  solemnity]    Only  be  true  to  your- 


Fanny's  First  Play  245 

self,  Miss  O'Dowda.  Keep  serious.  Give  up  making  silly- 
jokes.  Sustain  the  note  of  passion.  And  youll  do  great 
things. 

Fanny.    You  think  I  have  a  future? 

Trotter.    You  have  a  past,  Miss  O'Dowda. 

Fanny  [looking  apprehensively  at  her  father]  Sh-sh-sh! 

The  Count.    A  past!    What  do  you  mean,  Mr  Trotter? 

Trotter  [to  Fanny]  You  cant  deceive  me.  That  bit 
about  the  police  was  real.  Youre  a  Suffraget,  Miss 
O'Dowda.     You  were  on  that  Deputation. 

The  Count.    Fanny:  is  this  true? 

Fanny.  It  is.  I  did  a  month  with  Lady  Constance 
Lytton;  and  I'm  prouder  of  it  than  I  ever  was  of  anything 
or  ever  shall  be  again. 

Trotter.  Is  that  any  reason  why  you  should  stuff 
naughty  plays  down  my  throat? 

Fanny.  Yes:  itll  teach  you  what  it  feels  like  to  be 
forcibly  fed. 

The  Count.  She  will  never  return  to  Venice.  I  feel 
now  as  I  felt  when  the  Campanile  fell. 

Savoyard  comes  in  through  the  curtains. 

Savoyard  [to  the  Count]  Would  you  mind  coming  to  say 
a  word  of  congratulation  to  the  company?  Theyre  rather 
upset  at  having  had  no  curtain  call. 

The  Count.  Certainly,  certainly.  I'm  afraid  Ive  been 
rather  remiss.    Let  us  go  on  the  stage,  gentlemen. 

The  curtains  are  drawn,  revealing  the  last  scene  of  the  play 
and  the  actors  on  the  stage.  The  Count,  Savoyard,  the  critics, 
and  Fanny  join  them,  shaking  hands  and  congratulating. 

The  Count.  Whatever  we  may  think  of  the  play, 
gentlemen,  I'm  sure  you  will  agree  with  me  that  there  can 
be  only  one  opinion  about  the  acting. 

The  Critics.    Hear,  hear!     [They  start  the  applause], 

Ayot  St.  Lawrence,  March  1911. 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


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